The head of the Identification and Archive Department at the Provincial Civil Identification Service of Inhambane (SPIC), Maria de Lurdes, said last week that there are 13,860 Identity Cards (BI) that are not being claimed by their respective owners, more than a year after they were issued.

She said that the holders have already been notified to proceed with the collection of the documents, but have not yet appeared at the Identification and Archive Department of SPIC. With this that sector is beginning to run out of space to store the unclaimed documents, creating further embarrassment.

Besides notifying the respective holders via phone messages, the Directorate General of Civil Identification has designed new strategies, one of them being the introduction of a new ID request slip.

He explained that the new ticket only has the applicant's name, photograph, date of birth and place of issue. With the new model, the citizen is obliged to pick up his ticket since not all the identification data is on it.

For example, the new model does not show the applicant's place of birth, father and mother's names, place of residence, marital status, among other relevant aspects. Lurdes said that the objective is to oblige citizens to pick up the documents after they have been issued and to avoid that they lose their validity in the institution's boxes.

During the first week of March, the Provincial Civil Identification Service registered 2,343 requests for ID cards against 2,451 the previous week. Also in the same period 2,491 tickets were issued and 2,644 were delivered, against 2,914 in the previous week.

In the first quarter of 2021, the institution issued more than 29,675 requests, having received from the Directorate General of Civil Identification, 29,298 tickets. Of this number, 28,105 were delivered to the legitimate holders and close to 20 documents expired within the SPIC drawers, having been returned to the Directorate General for legal procedures.