Former policeman warns of identity theft

by Sarah-Jane Tasker.

A former police officer who plans to compete against Australia Post for major government contracts on identity checks has warned that Australia’s verification system is outdated, raising the risk of identity theft.

Geoff Stockton, who clocked up more than 22 years’ experience with the Victorian Police Force, has designed a new digital system to partner with pharmacies to provide a personal identification service.

“Australia’s current system of verifying a person’s identity is largely a paper-based system which has more holes than Swiss cheese and is open to serious problems such as identity theft, fraud and misrepresentation,” he said.

Mr Stockton’s company, the PRM Group — the largest online provider of Nationally Coordinated Criminal History Checks in Australia — launched PharmacyID about one year ago. It has signed up more than 1500 pharmacists, with plans to take that beyond 2000 by year’s end.

Brian Woodham, director of national sales at PRM and PharmacyID, said Australia Post had a monopoly on identity checks but had never offered a full digital service.

“No one is doing this service to the scale we are talking about with digital technologies,” he said.

“We are here to be competition for Australia Post. We have been in discussions with the government about various aspects of our business and the direction the government is preparing to go with this sort of stuff.

“There is a big passport application tender coming out at the end of this year, beginning of next year, and we are going to compete with Australia Post.”

Mr Stockton added that the Pharmacy Guild had previously approached him to see if it could win back the tender for passports, which pharmacies used to process.

“They are the most trusted organisation in Australia,” he said. “ If we went head to head with Australia Post on things like passports, we know where people would rather go.”

Mr Woodham said Australia Post offered a “good enough” service but he said he believed that PharmacyID had the perfect vehicle to move into the 21st and 22nd centuries.

Mr Stockton said the ability for people to create a digital identity was now unparalleled because of the power of applications such as photoshop, which allowed people to easily create or alter digital images.

He said many people had had their identities stolen, with significant impacts on their lives and that of their families.

The PharmacyID head said that through the service he had created, he had a chance to make a dent in identity theft through the electronic ID service.

The system he created sees PharmacyID pay the pharmacist about the cost of a script.

Mr Stockton said the service had started with online Nationally Coordinated Criminal History Checks (NCCHC). A person would apply online for a NCCHC and then print out a receipt with a bar code and take that to the pharmacy to be scanned.

“The original documents don’t need to leave the person’s hand and the pharmacist is now getting paid for something they never traditionally got paid for.”