Resident registration
A resident register is a government database which contains information on the current residence of persons. In countries where registration of residence is compulsory, the current place of residence must be reported to the registration office or the police within a few days after establishing a new residence. In some countries, residence information may be obtained indirectly from voter registers or registers of driver licenses. Besides a formal resident registers or population registers, residence information needs to be disclosed in many situations, such as voter registration, passport application, and updated in relation to drivers licenses, motor vehicle registration, and many other purposes. The permanent place of residence is a common criterion for taxation including the assessment of a person's income tax.
Africa
South Africa
introduced the Population Registration Act in 1950, which created a national population register, and required the classification of residents based on race, and the issuing of identity cards. This system formed an important part in the pass laws, one of the dominant features of South Africa's apartheid system, after the Native Laws Amendment Act and the Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents Act of 1952 regularized their use. The apartheid system effectively ended in 1986.Americas
Canada
Canada does not have compulsory registration of residence, though residence information needs to be disclosed in many situations, such as voter registration, passport application, provincial health care card, and updated in relation to drivers licenses, motor vehicle registration, and many other purposes.United States
Neither the federal government of the United States nor any U.S. state has formal resident registration systems. Refusing or neglecting to answer questions for the United States Census, such as current address, is punishable by fines of $100, for a property or business agent to fail to provide correct names for the census is punishable by fines of $500, and for a business agent to provide false answers for the census is punishable by fines of $10,000. Registrants in the Selective Service System must notify Selective Service within 10 days of any changes to any of the information he provided on his registration card, like a change of address. In California, anyone with a driver's license must notify DMV of a change of address within 10 days or face a typical fine of $214, and anyone who has applied for or received a vehicle registration must notify DMV of a change of address within 10 days or face a typical fine of $178.Voter registration has a residency requirement and is used for jury assignments and other government tasks.
A person's current address is often registered for state-issued identification cards and driver licenses. In some jurisdictions a "non-driver's license" or "non-driver photo identification card" is issued as a document containing residence details. Each state has their own requirements for keeping documents up-to-date and may require persons moving into the state to obtain a driver's license from that state within a given period of time.
Aliens in the United States staying for more than thirty days are generally required to register with the Federal government pursuant to the Smith Act and carry proof of registration at all times; for permanent residents, the proof of registration comes in the form of a Permanent Residence Card while, for other aliens, this can be in the form of either an Employment Authorization Document or the I-94 card together with a valid passport.
Europe
European Union
Within the European Union a regulation for the European-wide census was agreed that allows for a register-based census that may use the continuously updated information from the national resident registers with a statistical correction drawn from a sample census performed at another magnitude of the census poll. The first register census was performed in 1981 in Denmark, joined later by other Nordic countries. Germany, Austria and Switzerland intend to use a register-based census model for the EU Census scheduled for 2011.Austria
The residence reporting requirement requires a change of address to be registered and deregistered within 3 days. The current place of residence is reported by means of a registration form sent to the local administrative authority.On 1 March 2002 the regional resident registers were centrally stored on the newly established Zentrales Melderegister. Some larger cities continue to run their own local resident registers, which are synchronized with the central database. A residence document from the database is called Meldeauskunft, and includes information about third persons unless those have filed to restrict public access. As of 2006 the ZMR was extended to include additional personal details from the civil registers; It is envisaged to include records from even more government databases.
Permanent access to the ZMR is granted to some profession that require regular residence checks like lawyers, banks, professional associations and collection agencies.
Belgium
In Belgium, a change of address must be declared to the municipality within eight days of its occurrence. The municipality verifies the change of address by sending a police or municipal officer to the new address. If the change of residence is confirmed it is registered in the municipal and national registers and the resident or residents concerned must present themselves to the municipal administration to have their national identity card and any motor vehicle registration papers updated. The change of address is forwarded by the municipality to social security agencies.Bosnia and Herzegovina
The compulsory resident register was handled separately by the regional offices even before Yugoslavia was split into sovereign states.Denmark
The compulsory resident register is run by the folkeregister which hands out a CPR-Number. Foreigners need to register when intending to stay longer than three months, six month if they are from a Nordic, EU, EEA country or Switzerland.Finland
The compulsory resident register is run by the Population Register Centre, a government agency that also hands out the Personal Identity Code, which consists of eleven characters: six digits for the birth date, one character for the birth century, three additional digits and a checksum character. Many companies and societies have registered for direct access to the resident register. Upon relocation, one only needs to declare the new address to the resident register and these companies will update their address registers accordingly. Although this makes it easier to handle the administrative tasks of taking a new home it has also been criticized for its lack of personal data privacy.France
France utilizes a national identity card, an official non-compulsory identity document. The address information on the card is merely derived from other documents like electricity bills. There is no requirement to notify change of address, which leads to the situation that the current address is often verified by showing bills relating to the current home.There are plans to introduce a new identity card that was to be implemented starting in 2007. The scheme bears many similarities to the British ID card. The new identity card which includes biometric data was approved by French government on March 14, 2021.
Germany
The registration of residents is a task of the municipality which do often create a separate resident registration offices to run the resident register. The resident register is a public register in Germany — within the limits of resident privacy laws and regulations. Since 2007, when moving between municipalities, the registration office will electronically de-register at the registration office of the old residency. The concept of the registered primary residence has special legal ramifications, primarily involving tax.Although Germany has a strict registration system for centuries, there had been a strong opposition towards a single identification number. All registration numbers were local to the Registration Office — even split within a single municipality into the Office for Civil Register, tax office, etc. In 2008 a new system was introduced with a national tax payer number. It is still debated how much more information will be attached to the national identification number when the federal resident register is activated.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no central administration of resident registration in Germany. The exception is the registration of resident aliens. Registration is organized by 5283 local offices throughout Germany. Until 2009, the legal requirements pertaining to resident registration were governed by state legislation, which differed in terms of the period allowed to register a change of address. Each state was able to produce its own laws and regulations governing access to personal information in the register and the fees for providing a residency document for oneself or for a third person.
The "Federalism Reform", which became effective on 1 September 2006, has moved the legislation for resident registration to the federal level. The Federal Ministry of the Interior was preparing a federal law to replace the state laws on resident registration which was scheduled to pass by 2010. The new law would assign that a Federal Resident Register shall be created to be run in parallel with the local resident registers. The nationwide register shall assemble a number of personal identifying information drawing from multiple sources including resident registers, civil registers and taxation offices. During a scandal with list brokers obtaining large amounts of addresses from catalog selling company databases in 2008, the coalition split up over the question — Brigitte Zypries opposed the plans of the Ministry of Interior led by Wolfgang Schäuble. She proposed that the current local registration offices should be networked instead. In the new government of CDU and FDP the plans are blocked, as such a central database is in clear opposition to the FDP's aim to increase data privacy.