The Director-General of IONI, Reynold Guerrier
Port-au-Prince, 12 December 2025.- The National Identity Office (ONI) is preparing a major reform: by 2026, every Haitian child should receive a unique National Identification Number (NIN) at birth. While 6.3 million citizens already have identity cards, the institution wants to generalize access to legal and digital identity in a context of administrative and fiscal transition.
The Director General of ONI, Reynold Guerrier, in an interview granted to Magik 9 on Friday 12 December, confirmed that the institution is accelerating the modernization of the national identification system. A pilot project for children's identity cards is already under way, pursuant to the decree of 11 March 2020 which requires the compulsory identification of any natural person.
According to Mr. Guerrier, the program will be officially launched in the first quarter of 2026. Each newborn will receive a NIN, integrated with a modernized birth certificate. However, there is still a shadow zone: the future of the current birth certificate, the maintenance or replacement of which has not yet been decided by the authorities.
The reform also affects taxation. The replacement of the tax registration number (NIF) by the NIN, announced for the beginning of fiscal year 2025–26, is slow to come into force. Despite the commitments made during the workshops of the Haitian Institute of Statistics and Informatics (IHSI), the Directorate General of Taxes continues to charge the costs related to the NIF.
For Reynold Guerrier, these transformations are essential to strengthen the state and guarantee fundamental rights: « Without legal identity, the citizen remains invisible. Identity opens up access to public services, care, education and financial services »he recalled at the IHSI forum.
W. A.
