Afghanistan begins biometric registration of civil service employees

Feb 18, 2019 | Stephen Mayhew

Afghanistan begins biometric registration of civil service employees

In an effort to improve human resource planning, Afghanistan’s Independent Administrative Reform and Civil Service Commission (IARCSC) is now registering biometric data of all civil service employees. The first person registered in the new Human Resources Information Management System (HRIMS) was the head of IARCSC.

According to a statement issued by IARCSC, the new HRIMS system will include each civil service worker’s name, nickname, father’s name, grandfather’s name, identity card number, gender, date of birth, place of birth, current residence, email address, phone number, education level, education field, job description, fingerprint, retinal ID and photo. Afghanistan currently has about 424,000 civil service workers.

Worker’s name, nickname, father’s name and bank account number will also be added to the worker’s bank cards and synched with the payment system of the Ministry of Finance so that only eligible civil service workers would be able to receive their salaries.

The head of the IARCSC, Ahmad Nader Naderi, said the creation of HRIMS is a significant development in Afghanistan’s civil and state administration and that the system would be expanded to the Ministry of Education and other government departments after it was fully implemented in IARCSC.

HRIMS was designed by Afghans with the cooperation of Central Statistics Organization and Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

Last year the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan deployed biometric capture devices from DERMALOG to verify the identities of voters in the national election.