Identity cards. (Letters).

SIR: You say various things about identity cards in your November 2001 editorial. Not all of them are borne out by experience, not even by the examples you give. For instance, there is indeed a valid argument from expense against them. What counts is not the fact that a universal card would be cheaper than a multiplicity; the costs we now face are sunk costs, and a new universal card would impose new and additional costs.

As for risks of being on a central registry being "fantasy and paranoia", even the limited system we now have has already presented me personally with a real and continuing burden. As I am one of the unexpectedly frequent victims of faulty data matching, I have a continuing struggle to prevent being linked to other people of the same name and date of birth. You say that errors "can be dealt with easily enough", but that is not so even now. That is, they can be dealt with but not easily; after two years I found that I had not received driving licence correspondence as it had been sent to Koo Wee Rup.

As, when and if there is a universal system, far from these independent checks being as convenient the errors that creep in will be locked in; any "check" will simply be referred back to the central registry which will accurately if spuriously return the false information it holds. If on immigrating I found it hard enough to get a Tax File Number on the grounds that I already had one and lived in Gippsland, what would happen to people in my predicament in the future? The worst that has happened to me so far was being given a difficult deadline to challenge a Social Security penalty some years ago, with a ...