Lesson 1: 30 days and nights of accelerating the completion of digitizing civil status data
Editor's note: Digital transformation is a fundamental solution to change the way administrative procedures are handled in many fields, including the judicial sector. Recognizing the position and role of the Project on developing applications of population data, identification and electronic authentication to serve national digital transformation in the period of 2022-2025, with a vision to 2030 (referred to as Project 06) for judicial work, with the highest political determination, the Nghe An Judicial sector has resolutely implemented the tasks of the project...
15/04/2025
Ky Son is a remote district with many difficulties, but under the strong direction of the district People's Committee, the close guidance on professional matters of the district Justice Department and the efforts of the staff and civil servants of 21 communes and towns in the area, after only 10 days and nights of digitizing civil status data in the 30-day and night campaign launched by the Nghe An Department of Justice, Ky Son district has reached the finish line early.
Accordingly, the entire district has transferred 1,412 birth, marriage, death, marital status confirmation, and father, mother, and child recognition data to the electronic civil status database.
Mr. Lau Ba Cho - Head of the Justice Department of Ky Son district said: Anticipating difficulties in machinery, equipment, human resources, etc., the department advised the District People's Committee to establish a Steering Committee headed by the Vice Chairman of the District People's Committee and a digitalization team consisting of judicial officers and information technology officers to support and provide technical guidance to the communes; any problems would be resolved immediately. Accordingly, the support team of the district steering committee prepared a template according to a "form" and sent it to the communes and towns to update according to the template to ensure correct and sufficient data collection.
Thanks to that, many localities in Ky Son district have reached the finish line early and exceeded the target. Typical units are: Muong Xen town, Muong Tip, Muong Ai, Pha Danh, Huoi Tu, Muong Long, Huu Kiem communes...
Recognizing that effort, Chairman of the People's Committee of Ky Son district Nguyen Viet Hung issued Official Dispatch No. 325/UBND.TP dated March 14, 2025 praising all leaders, judicial officials, civil status officers and civil status data digitization teams of 21 communes and towns. At the same time, he requested the Chairmen of the People's Committees of communes and towns to continue promoting the achieved results, focusing on digitizing records of changes, corrections, and additions to civil status and cleaning up civil status data.
In Quy Hop district, identifying the 30-day and night campaign to digitize civil status data as a particularly important task contributing to creating data for the national electronic civil status database to ensure unified application, interconnectivity, synchronization, serving national digital transformation, the People's Committee of Quy Hop district directed the Department of Justice and the People's Committees of 21 communes and towns to overcome difficulties and take action with high determination.
After only 9 days of implementing the campaign, the entire district has transferred 4,205 birth, marriage, and death registration data; confirmation of marital status; recognition of father, mother, and child on the system, basically completing the assigned task.
Hoang Mai Town is also one of the units that finished early in the 30-day and night campaign to digitize civil status data. Within 14 days, all 10 wards and communes in the town transferred 794 birth, marriage, death, adoption and guardianship data and scanned and attached 5,042 pages of civil status books to the National Civil Status Database system.
In Dien Chau district, before the campaign, the whole district still had about 2,000 undigitized data. By March 11, 2025, the district had completed the digitization of civil status data in the area.
After completing the update, this data will be transferred to the National Electronic Civil Status Database, which best meets the requirements for registration and management of civil status according to the Law on Civil Status and resolves administrative procedures in online civil status registration, with the ability to connect to provide civil status information to the National Population Database and other relevant specialized databases.
Besides, ensuring the accuracy and security of digital data is also an important requirement, when civil status information is related to the rights and legal obligations of citizens.
According to the leader of the Department of Justice: Digitizing civil status data brings many practical benefits to people, state management officials and especially plays an important role in building and operating e-Government; contributing to easy preservation of civil status records and data, limiting physical damage; saving space, costs, and human resources due to having to store a large number of records every year.
At the same time, it helps to retrieve data easily and quickly, without spending much time looking for original records, thereby reducing the time to handle administrative procedures.
Nghe An has a total of 2,231,474 civil status records, although the volume of data that needs to be digitized is huge, requiring strong investment in technology, human resources and funding.
However, under the direction of the Provincial People's Committee, the efforts of localities and the high determination of the Justice sector, from 2020 to before March 2025, the whole province has implemented the digitization of 2,023,255 data (reaching 91%), the remaining 208,219 data have not been digitized (accounting for about 9%).
At the online conference on February 11, 2025 on the implementation of the Project on developing applications of population data, identification and electronic authentication to serve national digital transformation in the period of 2022 - 2025, with a vision to 2030 of the Government (Project 06), the Prime Minister requested Nghe An province to complete the digitization of civil status data in March 2025.
Implementing the direction of the Prime Minister and the Chairman of the Provincial People's Committee, the Department of Justice issued a Plan to implement the 30-day and night campaign to complete the digitization of civil status data in the province. The campaign starts from March 1, 2025 to before March 31, 2025. The contents that need to be digitized include: Birth registration books, marriage registration books, death registration books, parent-child registration books, adoption registration books, guardianship registration books and divorce records.
Ms. Nguyen Thi Lan - Deputy Director of the Department of Justice, Head of the Campaign Steering Committee said that in order to digitize the remaining data volume in the province with quality and ensure the set progress, the Department of Justice has established a Steering Committee to implement the campaign, divided into 2 groups, each group in charge of 10 units.
Members of the Steering Committee are responsible for providing technical guidance and support in the implementation of civil status data digitization for assigned localities.
Before the 30-day campaign to digitize civil status data, implementing the peak emulation movement "Accelerating the completion of the Civil Status Data Digitization Plan" launched by the Ministry of Justice, Nghe An Department of Justice focused on directing the strengthening of review and comparison to ensure the accuracy and completeness of digitized data, speeding up the approval of data from Civil Status Software 158 into the Electronic Civil Status Database. At the same time, establishing an inspection team to digitize historical civil status data in some localities in the province.
The inspection results show that the digitization of historical civil status data at the units has been seriously and methodically implemented, the basic data has been digitized relatively completely, creating convenience for judicial officials in the process of exploiting and looking up civil status information, serving the issuance of copies of extracts...
However, the process of digitizing the Household Registration Book still has some problems and obstacles such as: some books are old and damaged, the information is unclear, the ink is blurred, making it difficult to digitize; Books have been handed over to the digitizing unit but there are still some that have not been digitized; there is still a situation of duplicate data because at the time of approval, the software has not opened the duplicate checking function; some cases of information errors such as year of birth, ID card number, wrong registration type, registration subject; some scanned data files after being transferred to the Electronic Household Registration Database cannot be opened due to errors during the download process.
In addition, the 158 civil status software; the electronic civil status software often has errors and is overloaded, significantly affecting the digitization progress at the local level.
To remove difficulties and obstacles in the digitization process, Nghe An Department of Justice has sent official dispatches requesting the Ministry of Justice to continue to supplement information on administrative place names on the Civil Status Software 158 to serve the digitization of Civil Status Books; at the same time, continue to urge districts, cities and towns to review, digitize and clean civil status data with national population data.
After launching the 30-day and night campaign to complete the digitization of civil status data in the province, Mr. Vo Van Tam - Head of the Department of Administrative Justice (Department of Justice) said: Working groups of the Steering Committee under the Department of Justice also went directly to the grassroots to inspect and guide and support localities to remove difficulties and obstacles.
In some localities, the judicial staff has solid expertise and is proficient in IT, so they are very creative in implementing the 4 steps (collecting and classifying household registration books that need to be digitized; scanning/taking pictures of household registration books and creating excel data files; processing data after digitization; checking, approving and officially entering data into the national electronic household registration database).
In addition, identifying the importance of digitizing electronic civil status data, the People's Committees of districts, cities and towns have directed the Department of Justice and the People's Committees at the commune level to focus on implementing digitization. At the same time, assigning officials and civil servants with information technology qualifications to support the judicial department in implementing digitization; arranging funding and facilities to ensure the digitization of data on schedule. According to the initial plan, the volume of civil status data that needs to be digitized in the whole province is 208,192 data.
However, during the implementation of the 30-day and night campaign, the civil registration agencies reviewed and supplemented 213,087 data sets eligible for digitization (10,893 data sets were still old, torn, missing, or had unclear information, which did not meet the conditions for digitization).
Thanks to the synchronous participation, Nghe An has completed the digitization of 213,087/213,087 eligible data, reaching a rate of 100%, (there are 10,893 data due to old, torn, missing, unclear information books that do not meet the conditions for digitization). Thus, from 2020 to present, the whole province has implemented the digitization of 2,217,240 civil status data.
With digitized data, civil status registration agencies in the province have been exploiting and applying it in issuing copies of civil status extracts, verifying, looking up, and confirming civil status for organizations and individuals, contributing to the quick and convenient settlement of administrative procedures. At the same time, strengthening the State management of civil status...
