Another challenge faced by the office was the issue of duplicate cases. A duplicate case is when two or more individuals share one identity number. It was reported that it takes approximately two weeks for the Head Office in Pretoria to resolve these cases. It was indicated that it was even more of a challenge when a duplicate case was discovered when a death certificate had to be issued. The department resorted to issuing handwritten death certificates so that the deceased can be buried. The difficulty was that these handwritten death certificates are sometimes not accepted by the insurance companies.