SANTO DOMINGO.- Central Electoral Board (JCE) president Julio Cesar Castaños said Wedenesday that 10,000 cases of Civil Registry fraud have been detected in the last year.

He said 70 percent of those are cases of double identity and the remaining 30 percent are other fraudulent causes.

The official warned that the court’s commitment to society is to clean up the Registry, and make it an instrument of credibility at the international level. “At the moment, the electoral registry is permeated by fraud, that’s why the Central Electoral Board must take total control of the Civil Registrars.”

Castaños, interviewed in the Colorvision program Hoy Mismo, said the number increases in the measure the investigation widens and the system is updated. He said among the irregularities most detected is the use of documents belonging to close relatives to obtain birth certificates, that are generally used to travel abroad.

He admitted that much of those cases are detected in the United States and some European nations, which notify the Dominican authorities on the frauds. “The JCE doesn’t fear being taken to court. No one or nothing is going to stop me. It’s not an act of pride or of great power, but of conviction.”

Castaños said the penalty for those who alter official documents is “harsh” and refered to former civil official in Tábara, Azua (south), who sentenced to five years in prison for his participation in the forgery of a birth certificate.

In the last few years several embassies have complained to the authorities about the large number of Dominicans who that travel to other nations with altered identities.

He said data alteration in birth declarations as well as the nearly 1.5 million children without that document are the JCE’s main challenges, in the process to modernize the civil registry.