With the introduction of electronic services within the Interior Ministry, the government has begun scrapping the use of residency stickers, and upgrading the use of the Civil ID issued by the government to residents of Kuwait – a change which has been adopted by expat residents, as part of their compliance with the law.
However, this transition has been met with challenges right from the beginning, as the Civil IDs issued by the Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI) have been filled with errors, which were mainly attributed to personnel handling.
Expats to Update Civil ID Names Online – Interior Ministry
In line with this, the Ministry of Interior has instructed the Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI) to stop offering services to correct the Latin names of residents, as this can now be done online, as shared in a report by the Arab Times Online.
Despite this update, the PACI announced that it will continue to provide its electronic services for Latin names in terms of checking it before printing the civil ID card or after it has been corrected but will not make the corrections themselves, as it was done before.
According to the update, the correction of the names will now be done by the immigration departments (Computer Department) across all governorates. Furthermore, the PACI no longer receives requests for correction of names which is done through the automated system.
However, they will accept requests for services to correct an error in the civil card which has been issued after cross checking with the document issued by the Ministry of Interior.
Since the renewal services has been offered by the ministry back in March of this year to do away with the residence sticker on the passport, the number of transactions has exceeded 250,000 at a rate of up to 20,000 IDs per day and the IDs were noted to be full of errors committed by the employees of the Interior Ministry.
Some residents even complained that their names on their IDs were correct both in Arabic and English but after the renewal they were shocked to find serious mistakes and erroneous amendments which forced them to visit the immigration departments again and submit requests for correction for which they had to wait in queue for hours.
Residents expressed their frustration about the new process, noting that some departments had earlier succeeded in correcting the name after a request was submitted without having to wait for completion of transactions since they were notified by SMS after completion. However, this process was not adopted by other departments, which led to unprecedented chaos in handling these transactions.
Those who wish to correct their names on the Civil ID may file the changes through this website.