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Annual Report
Purpose: To verify, by comparing details with the Births, Deaths and Marriages registers, whether a person is eligible for a passport, and to detect fraudulent applications.
BDM disclosure to Passports (DIA): Possible matches from the Births, Deaths and Marriages (relationships) databases are displayed to Passports staff as they process each application. The details displayed include full name, gender and date of birth.
Compliance: Compliant.
Technical Information
| Information matching provision | Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021, s 112 |
| Year authorised | 2001 |
| Year commenced | 2003 |
| Programme type | Confirming eligibility Detecting illegal behaviour |
| Online transfers | Yes |
System description
Passports staff enter information provided on application forms into the passports processing system, KIWI. This automatically conducts birth and death checks. Marriage checks and applications that cannot be processed through KIWI because of functionality limitations are processed using the older OLEV (On-line Live Event Verification) system.
For searches of the births and marriages entries, confirmation allows application processing to proceed. Where there is doubt, cases can be referred to BDM staff for resolution. If there appears to be a match with an entry from the register of deaths, the processing of the passport application is halted and the application referred for investigation of possible fraud.
Notices of adverse action are sent when Passports staff cannot satisfactorily match the information supplied to the appropriate birth, death, marriage or relationship record. Almost all of these are resolved by contacting the applicant for clarification.
Annual audits of the process are conducted to give assurance that the matching programme is operated in compliance with the Privacy Act. Reporting of these statistics to give context to the audit reports was commenced in 2008/09.
Recent activity
| 2016/17 | 2017/18 | 2018/19 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | 2021/22 | 2022/23 | |
| Passport applications | 729,090 | 736,270 | 751,397 | 537,798 | 158,114 | 234,648 | 452,215 |
| Possible matches: Births | 1,142,068 | 1,097,563 | 1,039,741 | 738,722 | 223,345 | 447,934 | 1,178,795 |
| Possible matches: Marriage / Relationships | 84,455 | 77,847 | 71,484 | 49,463 | 10,989 | 26,778 | 63,143 |
| Possible matches: Deaths | 2,799,499 | 2,978,105 | 3,302,957 | 2,531,602 | 753,050 | 1,116,288 | 2,582,365 |
| Notice of adverse action | 2,972 | 2,748 | 3,240 | 2,326 | 649 | 780 | 4,157 |
| Successful challenges | 2,935 | 2,718 | 3,185 | 2,276 | 607 | 739 | 4,131 |
| Passports issued (diplomatic, official and standard) | 721,645 | 724,984 | 736,208 | 540,059 | 151,603 | 226,351 | 507,868 |
The difference between the number of applications and the number of passports issued primarily reflects applications that are being processed when statistics were compiled.
The utility of this provision was assessed in a report Passports and Citizenship (July 2014), and subsequently in Department of Internal Affairs, Government Super Fund, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, National Provident Fund and New Zealand Transport Agency information matching (July 2020).
