BILL ANALYSIS Ó
AB 2528
Page 1
Date of Hearing: April 30, 2014
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
Mike Gatto, Chair
AB 2528 (Skinner) - As Amended: April 1, 2014
Policy Committee: HealthVote:16-2
Urgency: No State Mandated Local Program:
Yes Reimbursable: Yes
SUMMARY
This bill requires the State Registrar to ensure that
diacritical marks on English letters are properly recorded on
birth certificates, death certificates, certificates of fetal
death, and marriage licenses , including, but not limited to,
accents, tildes, graves, umlauts, and cedillas, and to develop
procedures to include other reasonable requests relating to
names on these documents.
It also creates substantially similar requirements for the
Secretary of State, relating to certificates of registered
domestic partnerships, and the Department of Motor Vehicles,
relating to identification cards.
FISCAL EFFECT
This bill will have the following one-time information
technology (IT) costs:
1)Department of Public Health (DPH): Indeterminate, likely
significant reprogramming costs for the Automated Vital
Statistics System, the FileNET/AVSS Integration System, the
Electronic Death Registration System (EDRS), and the Fetal
Death Registration System (FDRS) (Health Statistics Special
Fund).
2)Secretary of State (SOS): Potential costs in excess of $10
million for reprogramming and upgrades of hardware and
software (GF/ Help America Vote Act Trust Fund).
3)Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV): Costs, potentially in the
millions of dollars, if it is possible to comply with the
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bill's requirements via reprogramming and/or upgrades. It is
unclear whether it is possible to reprogram existing DMV IT
systems to handle diacritical marks. If system replacement is
necessary in order to comply with this bill, costs would be
much higher (Vehicle License Fund).
4)Unknown, potentially significant state-reimbursable mandate GF
costs. Each local registration district and county recorder
has their own indexing system for birth certificate data that
is transmitted to the state, and counties have their own
systems and vendors to track marriage licenses. Costs could
easily be in the tens of millions of dollars if significant
systems upgrades are required across the state.
Ongoing and training costs are expected to be minor and
absorbable.
COMMENTS
1)Purpose . According to the author, names are symbolic, stick
with a person forever, and are often tied to cultural
traditions. The author believes the state should ensure the
proper recording of names on birth certificates and other
identifying documents.
2)Background . Diacritical marks include, but are not limited to:
grave or acute accents (è or á) and tildes (ñ or ã) commonly
found in Spanish language names, umlauts (ö or ü) used in
German, and cedillas (ç or _) found in French, Turkish, and
other languages. Many IT systems in use at state departments
appear to be unable to accept such markings. It does not
appear the state has a specific policy on the use of diacritic
marks, other than a default policy to use only standard
English characters marks on identifying documents. The data
system used by DMV cannot even accept lower-case letters, for
example.
3)Concerns . The County Recorder's Association of California
notes concerns with this bill, particularly around how it may
impact their ability to create a searchable index from birth
certificates that would allow them to locate a person's birth
certificate record. They indicate if marks are inaccurately
coded in the process of creating a searchable index, it may
result in a delayed response time or the inability to
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accurately locate the record.
4)Staff Comments.
a) Mismatch with Federal Identification Documents.
Accepting diacritical marks on California identifying
documents raises the potential issue of mismatch with
federal identification documents. It is unclear whether
there may be implications for security, air travel,
issuance of new identifying documents, or other purposes.
The Social Security Administration, for example, allows the
use of letters (without diacritical marks), spaces,
hyphens, and apostrophes only. An application for a US
passport does not make it clear what characters are
allowed; however, information provided by the US Department
of State passport information line indicates only standard
letter characters are acceptable. The International Civil
Aviation Organization, a United Nations Specialized Agency
that facilitates air travel and recommends specifications
for passports, specifies that for machine-readable fields,
diacritical marks should not be allowed on passports. For
example, the DMV uses a real-time electronic verification
with Social Security Administration to verify
identification. If diacritical marks are on the identity
documents provided to DMV and DMV attempts to verify the
name using the electronic system, the DMV may have
difficulty establishing a match, potentially causing
problems for consumers.
b) May Only Apply to Persons Born after Systems are
Implemented . Because birth certificates are used to
establish identity for other documents, such as a driver's
license, the opportunity to include a diacritical mark on
identifying documents may be limited to persons born after
this bill is implemented, unless an individual seeks a
legal name change.
c) Standardization. Numerous diacritical marks exist. The
author may wish to standardize, or authorize departments to
collectively standardize, the set of diacritical marks that
are acceptable for purposes of state identifying documents
in order to limit cost impacts and ensure systems can
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exchange information in a compatible manner.
Analysis Prepared by : Lisa Murawski / APPR. / (916) 319-2081