The citizen and resident registration system in Japan has already become electronic.  The online system has little to do for the fraud, since you need human staff to check if the online record match the reality anyway (unless you implant chips in citizens and monitors them mechanically).<p>The government inefficiency comes not from the technology, but the complicated rules and ambiguous responsibility between sections.<p>Note also that the &quot;missing&quot; has different nuance in Japan and in US (I only lived these two countries, so I can only tell about them).  In Japan, <i>every</i> resident must register his address to the city or county office; if someone doesn&#x27;t live in the registered address, the person could be technically &quot;missing&quot; for the purpose of statistics or census (police investigation or other official matter uses more strict definition of &quot;missing&quot;, off course.)