Newborn Baby Has Two Resident Registration Numbers... Community Center "Doing Our Best to Prevent Recurrence"

Community Center Accidentally Assigns Two Resident Registration Numbers to Child
Resident Registration Certificate and Family Relation Certificate Numbers Differ

Due to a mistake by a community center employee, a child less than a year old was assigned two different resident registration numbers.

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On the 20th, Yonhap News reported a bizarre case where the resident registration number of a child born in May last year differed between the resident registration certificate and the family relationship certificate. Mr. A, who lives in Seocho-gu, Seoul, visited a bank the day before to open a bank account for his 10-month-old son and was told that the child's resident registration numbers on the resident registration certificate and the family relationship certificate were different.

After contacting the Heukseok-dong Community Center in Dongjak-gu, where Mr. A had registered his child's birth, it was confirmed that the resident registration number on the resident registration certificate was correct, but there was an error in the last digits of the number on the family relationship certificate due to a manual transcription mistake by an employee. The resident registration certificate is processed using the Ministry of the Interior and Safety's computerized system, while the family relationship certificate is handled through the Supreme Court's computerized system. Community center employees had taken notes of the resident registration number from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety's birth report and manually entered it one by one into the Supreme Court's family relationship certificate system, leading to the error. As a result, Mr. A's son ended up with two different resident registration numbers.

Upon learning of the issue, Mr. A requested a correction of the resident registration number registered on the family relationship certificate and was told that the correction would take about a week. Mr. A said, "In the end, I couldn't complete the bank procedures. Taking care of a 10-month-old child makes going out difficult, and I feel uneasy because the correction of the child's resident registration number will leave a permanent record." He added, "I was surprised that there is still work that requires manual transcription. I don't understand why the system requires manual input instead of automatic computer entry," suggesting the need for improvements.

A representative from the Heukseok-dong Community Center said, "The resident registration certificate and the family relationship certificate use different computerized systems, so we operate with two separate computers." They added, "It is difficult to make immediate system improvements. Such mistakes must never happen. We will be more careful in the future to prevent such errors from recurring."

Meanwhile, this is not the first time such a bizarre case of being issued two resident registration numbers has occurred. In February last year, in Mokpo, Jeollanam-do, due to a mistake by a resident registration official, two children of Mr. B were each assigned duplicate last digits in their resident registration numbers, causing discrepancies between the family relationship certificates and resident registration certificates. Officials at Mokpo City Hall investigated the situation and corrected the resident registration numbers of Mr. B's children based on the resident registration certificates within a day. In 2020, a person who had lived with two incomplete resident registration numbers and surnames for over 20 years due to administrative errors regained their identity after an administrative lawsuit.