Turks & Caicos to deploy digital ID
A National ID Card will be available for all Turks & Caicos citizens starting in 2025.
E Jay Saunders, Deputy Premier and Finance Minister made the announcement in a town hall meeting on November 21st.
“Part of what needs to happen is have a unique identifier or a national ID card and we are now in the process of procuring that service, because once you have a national ID and you have one right system, once it is entered in the system you don’t need to have an NIB, NHIP…you have one identification and together with the e-governance platform it makes all the machines now start to talk to each other.”
Premier Hon. Charles Washington Misick
A unnamed company from the UK has been hired to perform consulting on the project and is in the information gathering stage. The project is being managed by the Office of the Premier. Not only will the ID provide convenience to Turks and Caicos citizens, who will be able to manage their identity using their mobile device, but the project will see consolidation across the entire digital identity infrastructure for the island territory as part of their E-Government implementation. The E-Government project additional includes major upgrades to the fiberoptic cable infrastructure, digitization of police records, and creating scalable portals for government interactions.
Deputy Premier & Finance Minister, Jay Saunders also confirmed that the new digital ID and paper counterpart would be available to all Turks and Caicos residents, including individuals living in the country on a work permit. Turks and Caicos has a population of 44,543, of which a sizable portion are foreign guest workers.