Kennitala Information
The kennitala (plural: kennitölur; abbreviated kt.) is a unique national identification number used by the Icelandic government to identify individuals and organisations in Iceland, administered by the National Registry (Þjóðskrá). Kennitölur are issued to Icelandic citizens at birth, and to foreign nationals resident in Iceland upon registration.[1] They are also issued to corporations and institutions.
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Number derivation
Kennitölur are composed of ten digits. For a personal kennitala, the first six of these are the individual's date of birth in the format DDMMYY.[1] The seventh and eighth digits are randomly chosen when the kennitala is allocated, the ninth is a check digit, and the tenth indicates the century of the individual's birth: '9' for 1900–1999, '0' for 2000 and beyond. Kennitölur are often written with a hyphen following the first six digits, e.g. 120174-3389.
Use
The system is similar to that employed by some other European countries, but Iceland makes unusually extensive and public use of its kennitölur, with businesses and educational institutions eschewing internal identification numbers in favour of the national system, and its use being mandated in banking transactions. Furthermore, online banking services in Iceland offer a lookup service to check names against numbers. Because of their public nature, kennitölur are not used for authentication. The completeness of Iceland's National Register has eliminated the need for country to conduct a regular census: population statistics can be obtained by simply querying the database.
References
- ^ a b "ID Numbers". Þjóðskrá. http://www.thjodskra.is/en/id-numbers/. Retrieved 2009-10-21.
External links
- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason. "Business::IS::PIN". CPAN. http://search.cpan.org/~avar/Business-IS-PIN-0.05/PIN.pm. Retrieved 2009-10-21. New link: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Business-IS-PIN-0.06/lib/Business/IS/PIN.pm A Perl module for validating and processing kennitölur.
- Ian Watson, "A short history of national identification numbering in Iceland," Bifröst Journal of Social Science 4 (2010), pp. 51-89, http://bjss.bifrost.is/index.php/bjss/article/view/63/65
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Categories: Icelandic society | National identification numbers
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