DICT Moves to Link SIM Cards to Digital IDs

Papua New Guineans will be required to link their mobile phone numbers to a government-issued digital identity as part of new measures to curb fraudulent SIM card use.

The requirement is part of the Government’s wider rollout of SevisPass, which is also being used to connect citizens with banking services and is being prepared for electoral roll checks.

The plans were announced by Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) Secretary Steven Matainaho during the U.S. Embassy Port Moresby’s “Digital Transformation at the Ground Level” event on Wednesday.

“SIM card registration will be tied to a digital ID for the purpose of reducing fraudulent use of SIM cards for scams,” Mr Matainaho said.

Once the system receives endorsement, citizens will have 12 months to register their SevisPass and link their SIM cards to their digital identity.

SevisPass is available through the SevisWallet application and is already being used for financial services. Users can open a MiBank account through the application, while further services are being added.

The Government is also preparing SevisWallet to allow citizens to check their electoral roll status.

Citizens who give consent could submit their biometric information to the electoral roll system, where records would undergo one-to-one and one-to-many checks to identify duplicate entries.

“We will try our very best to do two months of deduplication,” Mr Matainaho said.

The Secretary also clarified that the Department of ICT’s work on digital identity and electoral records should not be interpreted as the introduction of biometric voting.

“Unfortunately we can’t get into the picture of biometric voting. When I say we, it’s the Department of ICT,” he said.

The changes would give citizens one digital identity that can be used across several services instead of having separate identification processes for different systems.