Papua New Guinea has directed government agencies to prepare employee records for a program intended to provide every public servant with a digital ID by December 31.
The Department of Personnel Management has set an October 31 deadline for agencies to submit the required information. Each employee file must include a clear, recent photograph matched to the person’s payroll number and other staff details.
DPM will verify the submissions against government payroll records before issuing the credentials. The process is intended to identify fraudulent or duplicate entries, including ghost employees, under the government’s One Person, One Position, One Pay policy.
The Department of Information and Communications Technology is supporting the technical side of the exercise. Its SevisPass platform is designed to provide a trusted digital identity for access to government services, and the DPM circular encourages public servants to register through that ecosystem.
The public-service initiative gives the national system its first rollout across a large, defined user group. The National newspaper reports that the requirement covers approximately 140,000 public servants.
For each employee, the initial credentialing process begins with the verification of an existing employment record rather than a separate population enrollment drive. Payroll numbers provide the reference for organizing photographs and personnel data submitted by each agency.
Agency heads have been made responsible for compliance with Circular Instruction 19/2026. Human resources and information technology teams are expected to check that photographs and personnel information are complete and correctly associated before transmission to DPM.
The program builds on the launch of the SevisPass national digital identity system and SevisWallet in late 2025. That infrastructure was developed to support identity verification and access to public and private digital services.
The government is also developing proposed digital ID and biometric data legislation. Draft measures released for consultation address verifiable credentials, trust services and the handling of biometric information across the expanding identity ecosystem.
Sources: Papua New Guinea DICT, The National
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
