Several initiatives are underway in the Departments of Social Development, Justice, Transport, Correctional Services and the South African Police Services. These initiatives will make use of fingerprint biometric verification to authenticate the identities of persons for different purposes. For example, the Department of Social Development currently uses this technology to positively verify pensioners for payment.

There is currently no international standard for fingerprint biometric verification and this situation poses a real concern regarding the interoperability between the different initiatives with the implications of duplication of infrastructure and added expenditure to Government. The national fingerprint workshop highlighted this issue and raised the need for the establishment of national standard for fingerprint biometric verification initiatives in South Africa.

There was consensus from all parties at the workshop that the formulation of standards was necessary, but that the challenge came from the proprietary aspect of fingerprint minutiae extraction undertaken differently from manufacturer to manufacturer. It was agreed that a task team be formed that would include representatives from concerned government departments as well as industry and that this issue would be debated to eventually produce a national standard for Government. The task team is scheduled to meet on 4 December at CSIR and produce a world-first initiative that will assist the Government in following the policies put in place by the Department of Public Service and Administration and especially, the e-government policy framework..

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