Vietnam’s online residence registration in the Law on Residence, which took effect from July 1, would help people reduce administrative burden.

Accordingly, Vietnam’s residence registration will proceed online. All information about people’s residences will be updated and stored in the residence database.

In pursuant to the new Law on Residence, new household books and/or temporary residence books will not be issued to citizens registering for permanent and/or temporary residence. However, the validity of these two documents is still maintained until January 1, 2023.

Household registration books and paper temporary residence books will not be issued from July 1. Hanoitimes Photo: Ngoc Thang

Besides, the residence registry will update information about the new temporary and/or permanent residence period of the registered citizens to the residence database.

Speaking to local media at the end of June, Lieutenant General Nguyen Ngoc Anh, director of the Department of Legal Administration Reform under the Ministry of Public Security, said that streamlining administrative procedures would ensure people’s right to residency and avoid red tape.

The abolition of household registration books was simply a shift of the paper management to online residence registration, and household registration books will only be removed after the new national population database is put into use, Ngoc Anh said.

Colonel Nguyen Hong Ky, deputy director of the Hanoi Police, told The Hanoi Times that removing household registration books was merely simplifying administrative procedures but not abolishing the management through registration of permanent and temporary residence.

He noted that residents still have to carry out procedures related to residence management but with fewer formalities.

The household registration and its certificate, or the book, ho khau in Vietnamese, has been in effect since the 1960s as an instrument of public security, economic planning, and population management. Every citizen must register for a permanent residence at one address.

In the new context of economic reforms since the late 1980s and a socialist-oriented market economy, the ho khau has been kept to limit migration to booming cities, to no avail.

The book has come to signify Vietnam’s excessive red tape. It is required in most administrative procedures, including filing a birth certificate, going to school, and getting married, and can decide how easy it is for a person to find a job or buy a house or vehicle.

Source: Hanoitimes

Time to eliminate the household registration book: NA deputies

The insistence of National Assembly deputies on removing the household registration system, or ho khau, as it is called by Vietnamese, shows their great determination to remove the paper that is limiting civil rights.