The sins or omissions of the past are catching up with scores of Jamaican old-timers who can’t claim pension for which they have worked all their lives in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, because they have no valid birth certificates.

“It is heart-rending to deal with these cases of individuals who have toiled so hard for so many years in the cold and can’t collect their pension now,” said chief executive officer of the Registrar-General’s Department (RGD), Dr Patricia Holness.

Holness, her face a mask of concern, told the Sunday Observer that in some cases her staff could do nothing to help those individuals, but share their despair and “try to remain calm as they vent their frustration”.

She cited the case of one man who is reportedly roaming the streets of England because he can’t work and can’t collect pension because he was unable to provide proof of his age.

Many of these senior citizens had migrated with photocopies of birth certificates, some of which were not issued by the RGD. In some cases, they had changed their names without going through the RGD and subsequently had married, had children and worked for long years, never having applied for a birth certificate, Holness said.

For local senior citizens, many are only now finding the need for a birth certificate because they needed proof of age to get on discounted health or social programmes like Poverty Alleviation Through Health and Education (PATH), the Jamaica Drugs for the Elderly Programme (JADEP) and the National Health Fund (NHF).

Holness appealed to Jamaicans to take the matter of civil registration seriously, “because if not, it will come back to haunt you, as it is now doing many of our older compatriots”.

So significant is the problem that the RGD last September established an Authentification, Verification and Identity Department and currently has close to 1,000 cases under investigation, said department manager Yvette Scott.

“In some instances, we have had to refer the individuals to the Ministry of National Security because there is insufficient evidence of their identity,” Scott disclosed. “We have to concentrate on this because it is a problem.”

Holness noted that it was distinctly a problem with older Jamaicans born before 1956 and dating as far back as the 1940s. In those days, many of them had no reason to apply for a birth certificate. Some did not like their names and changed them, putting the preferred names on their children’s birth certificates.

One man left Jamaica under an assumed named and worked in it all his life. Now that he had reached retirement age, he needed his birth certificate, he told the RGD. But that could not help him, because he had not worked in that name.

“We have a case of the man who died twice because he assumed his dead brother’s identity. When he eventually died, the record was showing that the same man died twice (his brother) and he was still ‘alive’,” Holness bemoaned.

The RGD, an executive agency, is frequently the butt of criticism from Jamaicans who complain they sometimes experience long waits to get certificates.

But Holness insisted the department was achieving a 98 per cent success rate and had backlogs of less than two per cent, mainly to do with problems that were difficult to solve, like the one affecting the overseas pensioners.

The RGD’s customer base has grown from 150,000 a year in 1999, to over 500,000 currently, giving it the largest customer base in Jamaica. It received 110,800 applications between April and July this year, satisfying 113,724, or 103 per cent. The discrepancy is explained by the backlog cleared up during the period, Holness said.