Florida residents may have to wait longer for birth and death certificates as the state Department of Health deals with server problems.
State tax offices and funeral homes said they have lost access to the online system needed to issue certificates since last week.
They say the problem has caused additional stress for family members who have to bury or cremate Relatives and residents trying to obtain official documents to fill out applications and forms.
The Ministry of Health did not respond to calls or text messages on Tuesday explaining why the system had been taken offline.
Last week, a State employee sent an email to users of the electronic Birth and death registration systems that alert them the “storage migration” On Thursday, work will take place from 6 p.m. to midnight, during which time the system will be unavailable.
But on Friday, people were still having trouble accessing the system. At around 8 p.m. Friday, the state sent an email to users of the death registration system saying the online system was unavailable and directing them to paper forms to “help continue services offline.”
Cecelia Lawson, a licensed funeral director at Lawson Funeral Home in St. Petersburg, said the outage of the online system is an additional burden on the company and its customers.
Lawson mentioned a Muslim family who came on Tuesday and needed a signed death certificate that same day so they could conduct the funeral according to their religious customs.
“It’s 2024,” Lawson said. “This system shouldn’t be down for more than maintenance. It shouldn’t have been down since Friday of last week.”
Lawson said the situation was all the more worrying because state employees had Thursday and Friday off for Independence Day on July 4.
William Miller, one of the owners of Mohn Funeral Home and Cremation Services in Seminole, said he remembers regularly using paper death certificates about 15 years ago. He said it seemed “more difficult than it used to be” and required a lot of copies in many different places, but he said it was still possible to get it done.
Miller said he asked, but Beyond assurances that the government is working on it, no further details have been provided about the problems with the online system.
Both the Pinellas and Pasco tax collectors said they were unable to issue birth certificates while the system was down. Mike Fasano, the Pasco tax collector, said he had heard that the health department did not expect the system to be back up and running this week.
Problems have already arisen for some voters, including one who needed a birth certificate for an upcoming cruise, Fasano said.
