Notaries in Estonia find themselves in serious difficulty as significant technical problems have emerged when carrying out transactions with the new ID cards. In a letter sent to Information System Authority (RIA) Director General Joonas Heiter, Chamber of Notaries Executive Director Kaidi Lippus said a solution to the issue must be found immediately.

According to Lippus, since the introduction of the new ID cards, notaries have faced obstacles in using the daily and mandatory information systems and registers required for their work. Problems have arisen both when logging into information systems and registers and when providing digital signatures, she noted.

"At present, to our knowledge, there are still problems with the use of the e-notary information system and the Population Register," Lippus added.

More specifically, users of the new ID cards are unable to provide digital signatures in the e-notary information system. In order to access the system, users have had to carry out a time-consuming and complicated configuration together with IT support.

RIA has said that users of the new ID cards must use a so-called manually configurable solution. However, installing this solution is complicated and, worse still, does not guarantee that the problems will be resolved, Lippus said. For example, after setting up the manual solution recommended by RIA, digital signing in the e-notary system still did not work for two out of three users.

According to notaries, such an uncertain "manual configuration" cannot serve as a solution to the problem.

"Logging in and digitally signing with the new ID cards must not be any more complicated for users of information systems and registers than it was with previous ID cards. It is also unacceptable that all recipients of the new ID cards would have to carry out complicated and time-consuming additional configurations going forward. Already now, significant working time has been spent by e-notary user support, notary offices and others on testing the configurations recommended by RIA, while the number of users of the new ID cards will certainly increase in the near future," Lippus said.

The Center of Registers and Information Systems (RIK) has said that the current problems do not stem from the specifics of the information systems and registers themselves but are directly related to the new ID cards and the software used in them.

In addition, problems with using the Population Register persist, Lippus said.

According to Lippus, the alternatives offered by RIA — Mobile-ID and Smart-ID — are also not a solution. In the case of the former, carrying out notarial acts is cumbersome and inconvenient, while with the latter it is not possible to log into the e-notary information system.

"We emphasize that obstacles in using the e-notary information system — which is a notary's working tool — as well as the Population Register prevent notaries from performing official acts, meaning they cannot provide notarial services to clients. Please bear in mind that behind every such official act are people whose desired transaction or other procedure will go undone or will take an unreasonably long time due to repeated postponements," Lippus wrote in the letter to the RIA director general.

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