No one knows where millions of citizens’ personal data entries ended. Republika was the first to publish these findings, which were corroborated by the head of the State Corruption Prevention Commission, Bljana Ivanovska, in her interview with the Daily.

The documents disappeared after the selection of a  company to digitalize the Civil Registry Office’s archive. Around nine million documents are missing, including marriage certificates, death certificates, and birth certificates, for a period of over three decades.

The Anticorruption Commission pointed to two major weaknesses: first, there were many omissions in the tender procedure for the selection of the company that will carry out the digitalization, and the second one is the possibility of trading with the personal data, by which the data ended in one of our neighboring countries, because of huge neglect of security measures and procedures.

In the interview, Ivanovska explained that there were no security procedures for collecting personal data.

“Considering the fact that no one controlled the Ofice’s operations for decades, we asked the Agency for Protection of Personal Data to carry out extraordinary control. The results were astonishing: there are no logs for the entries, the data was kept on the servers, no one knows who was authorized to approach the data, the room where they were scanning the data had no security, the persons who fed the data to the servers were not accompanied by an authorized person from the Civil Registry Office. None of the rules or laws were respected, so we initiated a criminal procedure against the leadership and the employees of the Civil Registry Office”, Ivanovska explained, adding that no one knows the exact number at the moment, but millions of personal data entries are missing”, Ivanovska said.