Voon Shiak Ni
KUCHING: A woman has brought the case of her peculiar MyKad, which bears an odd number on the last digit, to the attention of National PKR Women vice president Voon Shiak Ni.
The last digit of the Malaysian identity card normally indicates the person’s gender, in that men were assigned an odd number on the last digit while women, an even number.
“We were given a case this morning where the MyKad holder is female but the last digit of her identification number is odd, which indicates she is male.”
“She (the complainant) told us that she had appealed four times to JPN (the National Registration Department) over the past 15 years but until today, she still cannot get the last digit rectified to indicate that she is female,” Voon explained.
“She visited our service centre this morning because her visa application was rejected by the Australian Embassy with a note that reads ‘Error: Invalid National Number Format’.
“She then went to JPN again and JPN Sarawak extracted the ‘Cabutan Daftar Kad Pengenalan’ to support her verification of her identity.”
“She related that all these years, she has been queried by the authorities on occasions when she needs to present her MyKad for verification.”
Voon claimed that JPN is aware of the case but indicated they could not rectify the matter or issue her with a new identification card number with an even number as the last digit.
“We are given to understand that JPN cannot rectify mistakes made on the last digit on the card which indicates
our gender and this is unacceptable,” she claimed.
This case is not a one-off case where the last digit of the MyKad does not accurately reflect the gender of the card holder, Voon claimed.
She said PKR urges JPN to look into this issue and to have a rectification mechanism in place for such mistakes.
“JPN needs to note that a mistake on the MyKad cannot be left uncorrected as it is a big problem for those affected to cope with the hassles and setbacks in efforts related to the verification of ones identity,” Voon stressed.
She pointed out that it was also ridiculous to let people move around without accurate details on their personal identification documents and yet the said documents are supposedly endorsed by the government.