In the quest to pass themselves off as Belizeans, persons seeking to get immigration documents often start with the forgery of birth certificates. Here on this newscast, we've shown you many cases where fraudsters manage to get a fraudulent birth certificate, with the stolen ID of dead Belizeans. After that, all doors open up, and they get passports, nationalities, Social Security Cards, voter's ID cards, driver's licenses…the whole nine yards.
And that's why today, the Senate decided that they will call officials from the Vital Statistics Unit to explain how their system works, and how it can negatively affect the Security of Immigration.
Here's the conversation on that topic with Director Locke:
Hon. Eamon Courtenay - PUP Senator
"The integrity of your system to a large extent is dependent on the integrity of Vital Stats?"
Diana Locke - Director of Immigration
"That is correct."
Hon. Eamon Courtenay - PUP Senator
"And you are saying to us that you still have concerns at this time about the accuracy and authenticity of two things: 1) what they are doing and things that come out as if it came from them, which is a different thing."
Diana Locke - Director of Immigration
"Well I am not sure about coming out as if it were from there, but certainly documents that we have seen which I am assuming came from Vital Stats. When we have doubt we check with them."
Hon. Eamon Courtenay - PUP Senator
"And have they ever said to you that's a fraudulent document?"
Diana Locke - Director of Immigration
"Since I've been there we haven't had a fraudulent case but it has a lot to do with maybe a spelling or accuracy of the information. From time to time we have queried late registrations because that is a practice that still happens and so that is another area of concern for us, because we don't know whether or not. There are cases right now that I am aware of that are being looked at and we are being made aware by Social Security. Social Security sometimes encounters those cases before we do, because people are required to have an ID when they come to the passport office. So after leaving the Vital Stats they would generally go to Social Security and apply for a card and they have a very good system in place where they are very vigilant in checking things and so sometimes they contact us and bring it to our attention things that they have flagged that they've seen."
Hon. Eamon Courtenay - PUP Senator
"So listening to you seems that we should have a session with Vital Stats to understand their system and what's happening there as it affects your department."
Diana Locke - Director of Immigration
"Yes."
We'll have more from the Senate hearings tomorrow when you'll hear what the Business Senator and the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee had to say about the Prime Minister's letter informing them that the committee will get no more funding after November.
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