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Friday, October 05, 2007

Smartcard an answer still looking for the problem?

We've heard from all sides of politics already on just every issue you could imagine and the election campaign hasn't even started yet. One issue that is probably not going to be up in lights if the Government can help it is the National Access Card proposal. It deferred the next round of legislation and the election will determine whether it gets the chance to take this step.

The Auditor General this week released a report - Proof of Identity for Accessing Centrelink Payments

It's all pretty dry stuff but according to an article in yesterday's Australian Financial Review "Finding weakens smartcard case" (no link available) buried away in the report is a finding that there is no evidence of identity fraud among Centrelink's customers or internal fraud by staff. These were important elements of the case for the National Access Card project. The KPMG report that identified the problems and produced the cost benefit for the proposal has never been released.

The Auditor General identified plenty of problems with proof of identity in Centrelink but the AFR article suggests the smartcard in some respects is still an answer looking for a problem.

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