The federal government has again ruled out the possibility of the introduction of national identity cards. However, in an effort to uncover identity fraud the government has said it is initiating the validation and reconciliation of information held on national databases like those of Medicare, Centrelink, and the ATO.

Identity fraud has been described as the crime of the new millennium. Indeed, identity fraud—involving the theft of one person’s identity or the creation of a false identity—has been previously estimated by the Attorney-General’s Department to cost more than $4 billion in Australia every year and according to Australian government reports accounts for more than a quarter of all white-collar crime.

Apparently these days around 40% of all crimes investigated by the Australian Federal Police involve identity fraud to some degree. Some criminal groups are even offering a false identity service where more than 100 points of false identification documents can be bought from as little as $4000.

On Tuesday, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock told a national security conference in Canberra that, in an attempt to wipe frauds out of the system, the government was cross referencing Australian identity information in databases, including those of Medicare and the ATO.

He promised that while properly identifying Australians would be the first step towards creating a national identity the government had no plans to do so.

“The real question as far as the government is concerned is to ensure that the data that we have is accurate. That’s one of the reasons we want to go through a number of the agency databases because one suspects that there have been creations of false identities and multiple identities over a period of time in some of those agencies,” Mr Ruddock said.

“There is a new effort being undertaken to cleanse a lot of those databases,” Mr Ruddock said.

“If you were to go down the route of a national identifier with all of the implications that has, all of the work that we’re doing now would have to be undertaken before you could believe that you had anything that was anywhere near efficacious,” Mr Ruddock said.

“We’re putting in place the appropriate strategy and in time we will look to see whether or not we’ve established that the government databases have been effectively enhanced to the extent to which we can go to the private sector,” Mr Ruddock said.

Mr Ruddock further clarified to reporters that the government had no plans to push ahead with an national identity card.

“We made it very clear that we’re not about establishing a national identity card, but we do want to improve the efficiency of the databases we hold,” he said.

“But we do recognise that particularly with identity theft, where people want to conceal their own identity and steal somebody else’s, that it is a major issue and it something that we want to see dealt with effectively.”