The National Communications Authority (NCA) has laid the blame for the millions of invalid SIM registrations discovered during the ID verification process squarely at the doorstep of the telecom operators for failing to monitor registration agents. Director-General of the NCA, Paarock VanPercy told Adom News in an exclusive interview the NCA does not do SIM registration but the operators do, and they hired agents to do the registration for them and the agents did a shoddy job because the operators did not monitor them. “The operators pay their agents per how many subscribers they are able to register so the agents overlooked the legally mandated requirements and registered many people without IDs so they can get their moneys from the operators,” he said. The law requires citizens to register their SIM cards using either passport, driver’s license, voter ID card, National Health Insurance Card or National Identification Card. ECOWAS citizens are required to use passports or other travel documents, and other nationals are to use only passports. Mr. VanPercy noted that some of the registration agents actually registered people with genuine IDs, but got some of their fine details, such as spelling of names wrongly, and those, plus registrations with no IDs, constituted the main reasons lots of the registrations came out as invalid during the verification. He said “NCA does not do registration – NCA does not have subscribers – it is the operators who do registration – it is MTN, Tigo, Vodafone, Airtel and Kasapa (Expresso) who have subscribers and they decided to use agents to register them and the agents have failed them.” A Summary of SIM Registration Data available from the NCA indicated that out of 22,708,716 submitted by the operators to the NCA for verification, some 5,580,875 came out as invalid as at February 6, 2012. Meanwhile there are some 1,457,858 which were yet to be verified and an estimated 463,443 SIMs whose owners have not bothered to register at all. In total, there is an estimated 7.5 million SIM cards that could be deactivated (it could be less) on March 3. 2012. The telecom operators argue those numbers include persons who used valid IDs, but could just be victims of human error during the manual verification process. But the NCA Boss said most the registrations found to be invalid were either dormant numbers sitting on the networks of the various telecom operators, or SIM cards registered fraudulently and are being used for SIM Box fraud. “The operators themselves attest to the fact that most of the numbers are dormant or SIM Box numbers so it is not as if this whole exercise was designed to deny genuine people of their rights,” he said. Indeed the Summary of the Registration Data indicated that apart from MTN, which submitted 9,162,599 of over 10 million customers it posted in December last year, all the other operators presented more data than the number of subscribers they posted in December last year. This has been explained to mean most of those numbers are either dormant or are being held by SIM Box operators, even though registered. Airtel Revenue Assurance Manager, Nixon Wampamba recently admitted in an interview Airtel found some agents to have registered more than the mandated five SIMs for some individuals and some without IDs, and those agents were either dismissed or handed over to the police. Mr. VanPercy, however, acknowledged that there could be some who may have used genuinely ID to register but because of some mistakes in the spelling of their names or human error at the various ID agencies their registrations came out as invalid. But he insisted those would only be a few, which could be dealt with between now and March 3, 2012 as and when they come up. “If you are sure you used a genuine ID but you got a message which says you are still not registered please return to your operator and it will be sorted out,” he said. He said the way to find out whether you are registered or not is to send a blank message to short code, 400 and you would receive a message telling you whether you are registered or not. Mr. VanPercy said the SIM registration was not different from what telecom operators do with their post-paid subscribers, whose details are kept by the operators for the purposes of billing them. “Moreover this is a national exercise that promises to be the biggest data base of citizens and residents in the country – because the voters register has only adult citizens above age 18 and the National ID register is not completed yet so this will be the biggest,” he said.