SA is closer to a smart card-based identity system, with the news that Home Affairs has awarded a R32 million IT contract to help clean up its database.
The department is implementing business intelligence technology from SAS Institute SA to help clean up its 80TB database in time for the roll-out of the proposed Hanis card system next year.
Hanis, the Home Affairs National Identification System, will ultimately replace about 30 million identity books with multifunctional smart cards over the next few years.
The SAS deal is for an Enterprise Intelligence Platform and Professional Services implementation.
SAS says the technology will assist with fraud detection, the elimination of bad-quality or duplicated data, and ensure the department has a single view of the citizen.
Government already has a precedent in this arena, as the South African Revenue Service last year set up a single view of the taxpayer, ridding itself of silos of information and aggregating all data onto a single screen.
The Hanis smart card system has been in the pipeline for several years, having been conceived in 1993 and approved by the Cabinet in January 1996.
The aim of Hanis is to record all fingerprints, photographs and other data digitally and allow several levels of verification that will be used whenever a government service is requested.
This includes pension payments, unemployment payments and access to the health system.
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