In a recent news release issued on behalf of the Registrar General Department (RGD), the public was assured that the department would shortly put to rest the unfounded reports of inefficiency and misplaced documents by ‘public demonstrations’ of the new online system.
The need for the RGD to demonstrate its competence in delivering its mandated services arose as a result of its forced move from the Rodney Bain Building; a move which was accompanied by persistent reports that documents from the “deeds and documents” department had either gone missing or had been damaged as a result of the move.
The RGD will demonstrate that anyone can log on to its site and conduct a search; that anyone who logs on will see that the information is current from 1994 onwards.
The government has been fast tracking its e-commerce plans of which the computerisation of the RGD is an integral part.
Indeed the Hon Allyson Gibson Maynard, the Minister with responsibility for the RGD, has travelled to one of the more remote islands in the archipelago to bring the good news that Bahamians living there and in similar settlements no longer had to make the time-consuming trip to Nassau to get their various certificates – birth, death or marriage – and that they could do searches on their property from the comfort of their own homes. So what is it that the RGD will demonstrate or attempt to demonstrate? That you can log on and at $10 for an hour you can search the index and find the documents for the period 1995 to the present.
An attempt to test the system found that the RGD has some work to do before it can have its public demonstrations.
First, it can take up to 20 minutes before you actually get onto the site to begin your search. You go to the index to identify and find the documents in which you are interested. The index shows that some of the volumes in the 9000 series, which contains information on deeds and documents for the year 2005, appear to be incomplete, because they stop short of the usual 600 pages that a volume normally contains.
In addition the Registrar General Department, has stated that its index to the records is complete from 1993 to current but for the period between 1993 and 1996, there are instances where the index is incomplete because the information is missing.
Does an incomplete index mean that there are documents that have not been entered? And if they are not entered then what happened to those documents? And what of the case in which the index states that documents are there but when you click to find them they are not there?
Then there are the usual typos ranging from inaccurate page numbers to misspelled names.
The RGD did not give a specific date for its demonstrations but there are enough bugs at the moment to make any demonstration in the immediate future an embarrassing exercise for the RGD.
By: C. E. HUGGINS, Business Editor, The Nassau Guardian
