Starting from May 29th, 2022, the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) of Singapore will only release digital certificates for birth and death. This program is the government’s continuous attempts to simplify and digitalize services for Singaporeans.
The aim of this digitalization is to ease the access of the certificates. Parents and their relatives can simply download and save the digital certificates on their mobile phone, laptop or personal computer. By the time this digitalization is applied, registering birth and death in places like hospitals and ICA buildings will not be available anymore.
For registering birth, parents need to register their baby on the LifeSG application within 42 days of the birth. Parents have 90 days to download and store the certificates on their devices. Meanwhile, for registering death, after the hospital certifies death, the data will automatically be logged in ICA’s system. The hospital will provide the information to the relative so that they can download the certificate from the My Legacy portal. The relatives have 30 days to download and save the certificates on their devices.
Besides simplifying the access, this digitalization also protects the data from data loss and data theft, verifies the authenticity, and prevents deception. All information in My Legacy, LifeSG, and ICA’s system will be secured in the database owned by the government. For those who had already had the physical certificates, they do not need to re-register for converting the certificates into the digital one because their data is still valid although they are not the digital version.
