A Ghost in the Machine

One of the first things anyone moving to Spain, or intending to do something like buy a house here, needs to do is to get an NIE. An NIE is the official ID for we foreigners - the initials translate as foreigner's identification number. NIEs come from the National Police and, whilst it seemed like a major hassle at the time, it's actually a dead easy process to get one.

Spanish society is pretty keen on identity.  I bought some tickets online for a theatre piece the other day - there are no tickets - I just have to show my ID when I get there on the night. Buy a train ticket, query a bill, buy a new phone, do almost anything in the least official and you will need to show your ID. It's a legal requirement to carry official ID when you are out and about.

The ID document for Spaniards is the DNI. Nowadays it's credit sized card and it has an electronic chip built into it. Amongst other things that means that Spaniards can identify themselves online via a card reader. My ID is a bit of folded paper. My Spanish driving licence uses the NIE number so, nowadays, I generally use that as my official ID. Nonetheless, every now and again some petty official asks for the folded piece of paper and then I have to show my official ID, my passport, to verify that the person named on the piece of paper looks like me. My NIE has no photo. My driving licence has no chip.

To prove who I am online I need a digital certificate or a digital signature. It's not difficult to get one. The people who make the coins and banknotes provide one for ordinary people as do most of the regional governments. Professional and private bodies also produce similar documentation either as a service to their members or at a cost.

I don't quite know how the certificates work but I presume that it's some bit of code that lodges in the computer and tells whichever website you are talking to that the certificate ties in with your claimed identity.

I've had five of these digital signatures now since I've been here. I need a new one each time I get a new computer. I got one from a bank that never worked. The others I've got from three or four different offices but they have all been supplied by the Autonomous Government of Valencia, the region where I live. The first one I got was a right pig to install. It would only work on certain versions of certain browsers but over time the process has improved.

To get the digital certificate I went to an office in Elda, about 25kms away. I showed my driving licence, gave them my email address and signed about four sheets of paper. I had to go between 8.30 and 10am but, that aside, the process was painless enough. The website, to install the certificate on my computer by registering the code I'd got from Elda, was working. In fact installing the new certificate was as easy as pie. It worked as it should. It worked with Chrome and, being that way inclined, I checked it on Mozilla and Edge and it works with them too. Yesterday I applied for a renewal of my European Health Card and that government website worked too. The last time I tried to get a health card online the process was a right royal pain but this time it took moments. That didn't use to be the case. It makes life easier when a website does what it says on the tin.

I see on the news that the UK (maybe that should be England and Wales considering the little problems in Scotland and Northern Ireland at the moment) triggered article 50 today to set about leaving the EU. Who knows, when I'm no longer an EU citizen with all the rights that has brought me in Spain, maybe I'll at least get a proper plastic NIE card!

Ho, ho! Sigh.

My draft tax declaration became available online the other day. Because I was self employed for a while in the 2015 tax year I'm going to need an accountant to sort it out but I'm putting off ringing him till my UK tax documentation turns up. Curiosity got the better of me though and I thought I would have a look at the online version to see what the tax office's initial assessment was. Rebate or more to pay?

On the first page, more or less in the first line, I noticed that my name was wrong. Although the effect on the printed form looks fine, which is presumably why I've missed it for the past ten years as have various tax offices and accountants, in fact the surnames and first names are mixed up. So they have my name as Jo and my surname as Christopher Thompson. The Jo is because, when I first registered at the Social Security, their database only had room for a forename fourteen characters long so the Christopher John had to be pruned. Heaven knows what Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso - that's Pablo Picasso to you and me - would have done. I quietly closed down the webpage. I'll let the accountant sort that out too.

The firm I work for sent me an email yesterday afternoon telling me that new legislation is coming into force which means that I will need to do something like the very first police record checks that we did in the UK. There is a pretty obvious question as to why anyone is allowed to work with children without being checked but we'll pass that by. The police, or in this case the Justice Ministry, will produce a form to say whether I have a criminal record or not. I asked my employer when this legislation would come into force. The end of the month was the reply. Good to get plenty of notice. Good that my employer is helping me with the process too.

I had a look online. Amazingly the process can be completed via the Internet. Even more amazingly I have an electronic signature which the Ministry site recognised. The form couldn't have been simpler: name and address type information, place of birth and bank payment details. I filled in the form and pushed send. Please fill in the phone number in the approved format it said. It took me four attempts to get that right. There was no suggested format but the international dialling code, with a plus, not two zeros, did the trick. This time it said that the information on my Foreigners Identification Number (NIE) form didn't match what I'd typed in. That's true because, as it turns out, the NIE, which I have used since 2005, is riddled with errors. It has me living in a street in Pinoso, instead of Culebrón, and the postcode is for Sax, a town about 30kms away. I won't bore you with the detail of the reason behind the particular errors but the underlying fault is quite bizarre.

To use a British example. Let's say I lived at 8 Oak Fold, the fold being an alternative to street or drive or avenue. The person who designed the database had never heard of fold as a street name so they left it out of their drop down lists. They didn't think to include a box for free text entry either. They did, however, make it essential that one of the street type names from the drop down list was included in the address. So, the person who is trying to register me on their database, let's say it's Council Tax, does the best that they can and uses Drove as a near equivalent. The form gets processed. The next time, at Vehicle Registration, the fold option is missing again. This time the form filler in chooses Street because that's the most frequent option. No problem to me. I get registered for Council Tax and Vehicle Registration. The problem arises ten years later when I think I live at 8 Oak Fold but Vehicles think I live at Oak Street and Council Tax think I live at Oak Drove and neither can find me.

I was just having a root around the Justice Ministry website. Google told me that its security certificate couldn 't be trusted but I ploughed ahead anyway. Apparently I can download the form, fill it in with a biro and post it to someone. This is quite an unusual Spanish option but it's a good one from my point of view. Actually, as I typed that I wondered if it were true. Lots of times the forms that require payment are triplicate forms which mean that they have to be picked up in person, filled in, paid for over a bank counter and then taken back to the office. Bit of a problem though. The website tells me that there is an intervención técnica - i.e. the site is being fiddled with - and that I have to wait till midnight which was 51 minutes ago as I type.

Ho, ho! Sigh.