Veriff on Age Verification With Birth Certificates

In the past, if you needed to check the age of a younger teenager or a child who didn’t have a driver’s license, you had two options:

• Estimate their age.

• Hope they had a passport.

While many (not all) people have a birth certificate, Veriff reminds us that digital age verification with a birth certificate is difficult.

“Processing civil documents at scale was once a legitimate operational nightmare. Birth certificates vary dramatically in format across states and countries, making manual extraction slow, inconsistent, and error-prone.”

Why the nightmare?

To examine the reasons for the birth certificate operational nightmare, let’s limit ourselves to the United States for the moment.

Driver’s licenses and similar IDs are challenging enough because they are issued by over 50 separate states and territories, and in several different formats (different driver license categories, non driver license IDs, plus special formats for minors and people below legal drinking age). So you’re talking about potentially thousands of formats.

But at least those are renewed every few years.

Birth certificates are often NOT renewed (although you could conceivably request a new copy). So as a state changes its birth certificate formats over the decades, it could go through multiple different formats. And in a few cities such as New York City, they issued their own birth certificates independently of the state.

To complicate things further, the security on birth certificates is rudimentary, or perhaps non-existent for older birth certificates. Compare to driver’s licenses which are always incorporating new security features. (And older driver’s licenses without those security features are no longer valid or accepted.)

In short, validating birth certificates is significantly harder than validating driver’s licenses, which is hard enough.

Can we verify birth certificates today?

Veriff says it’s becoming possible.

“Modern automated extraction technology changes that reality. What was once a processing bottleneck is now a scalable, deployable component of a serious compliance strategy.”

How?

“Unlike a standardized driver’s license with a predictable layout and a scannable barcode, birth certificates are heavily unstructured….Modern unstructured document technology eliminates this bottleneck. Advanced extraction tools use intelligent models to read and pull key details from complex civil documents, regardless of the layout. By accurately capturing the date of birth, parent or guardian information, and place of birth, these tools turn a clunky manual review process into a fast, scalable verification workflow.”

Apply enough processing power and enough smarts and you can solve anything.