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Cameroon rolls out tech plan to root out fraud

By , Freelance Investigative Journalist
Cameroon , 16 Jan 2023

Cameroon’s Ministry of External Relations (MINREX) has rolled out a new online service platform called LEGALIS to authenticate official documents.

According to officials the platform will digitise procedures and help authorities meet international authentication standards.

The platform will be used to authenticate and seal confirmation of this status on all documents.

Minister Delegate in the Ministry of External Relations Felix Mbayu said, “The main objectives of this measure are, inter alia, to secure state documents submitted by applicants, and make them more genuine and credible to our foreign partners, as well as to speed up the processing of said documents.”

The LEGALIS platform also offers certified translation, application for diplomatic car number plates and a diplomatic archive and is available with English and French language options.

With regards to the authentication of documents, to start a new application, the user has to provide information on the application in three steps: identification of user, type(s) of document(s) to be legalised and booking an appointment for submission of hard copies of the document to be authenticated.

The user must pay a processing fee of 20,000 francs CFA (US$33) per document against a receipt, exclusively through the website www.tresorpublic.cm (the government platform for securing non-tax revenue) in accordance with the country’s 2023 finance law.

The fee covers costs of processing the application and affixing a sticker to the said document to prove its authenticity in the receiving countries.

The user can track the progress of an application and officials have confirmed that the user is not eligible for a refund should any document be rejected.

In 2021, the National Agency for Information and Communication Technologies (ANTIC) released Doc Authentic, a comprehensive software package which is said will be incorporated in the information management systems of public and private institutions to maintain the security and integrity of official documents. 

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