Remarks on Disclosure of NRIC Numbers on Bizfile by Chief Executive of ACRA, Mrs Chia-Tern Huey Min
Audience
Public
News Topic
Corporate updates
eService announcements
Public advisories and support
Category
Speech
19 December 2024
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1. Good afternoon. Firstly, on behalf of ACRA, I would like to apologise for causing anxiety and concerns among members of the public over the disclosure of NRIC numbers in our Bizfile portal. Please allow me to share what happened, starting with explaining the role of ACRA.
2. As Singapore's national business registry, ACRA has a role in maintaining transparency in our business environment. To do this, we establish and administer a repository of information relating to business entities and the persons behind the entities, and provide access to the information. This facilitates due diligence checks that businesses and service professionals undertake. It supports corporate transparency and helps to guard against illicit activities.
3. The Bizfile portal allow public searches on information, such as company names and Unique Entity Number (UEN) of the companies, as well as company directors and shareholders. This information enables companies or individuals to verify the status of their counter-party and to confirm the identities of individuals associated with these companies before entering into a business relationship.
4. For example, a company considering appointing an individual as a board director can utilise the Bizfile portal to check the individual’s associations with other companies. This helps the company in a few ways – it can reveal potential conflicts of interest, past bankruptcies involving the individual, the performance of companies the individual is associated with, and whether the individual is holding an excessive number of directorships. These insights are crucial for the company to obtain but may not be appropriate to inquire directly from the individual.
Disclosure of NRIC numbers on Bizfile portal
5. To fulfil our role as a business registry, ACRA’s Bizfile portal is designed with a “People Search” function, so that users can accurately identify the specific individual that they are looking for, before paying for additional information such as the companies that he or she is associated with. In the old Bizfile portal, the public users could do a name search and get masked NRIC numbers corresponding to each of the names. The new Bizfile portal had provided full NRIC numbers, instead of the masked ones.
6. Let me explain how this came about.
7. As Minister Josephine Teo said just now, there was a wider government effort to uphold the use of NRIC numbers as a unique identifier, and to move away from the use of masked NRIC numbers, which provides a false sense of security. In particular, MDDI had issued a circular for government agencies to cease any planned use of masked NRIC numbers in new business processes and services. Unfortunately, there was a lapse of coordination between the staffs on how this was to be implemented. ACRA then proceeded on the misunderstanding that it should unmask NRIC numbers in the new Bizfile portal.
8. This was a mistake on ACRA’s part, and I apologise for this. Our oversight has caused anxiety and confusion to the public. As the owner of the Bizfile portal, ACRA should have been more mindful that many Singaporeans have long treated their NRIC numbers as private and confidential information, and would not want to have their full NRIC numbers searchable on the new portal.
9. We should also have taken more deliberate care to ensure that such information, deemed sensitive by many, is provided only when needed.
10. ACRA will learn from this lesson and tighten our systems and processes. We had disabled the People Search function last Friday night. We are now working hard to restore a revised service in a way that addresses both the public’s concerns and our users’ needs.
11. Minister Indranee will share more, so let me pass the time to her. Thank you.