NC families face lengthy delays for birth certificates. Will $8 million fix the problem?
As a single mother, it was hard for Adriana Yoguez to have time off from her job. So when she took the day off to mail a request in September 2022 for an amended birth certificate, changing her child’s name to Alexander, she wanted to do it all right, in one go.
She went to the courthouse, got the name change order approved, had it notarized, got a certified check and mailed everything out to North Carolina’s Office of Vital Records.
By October, the certified check had been cashed. But she would not hear anything from Vital Records for months, despite calling the office continuously, she said. Vital Records is tasked with recording and amending North Carolina vital events, including births, deaths, marriages, and divorces.
Thousands of North Carolinians are waiting, at times for months or over a year, to get birth certificates issued or amended. As of mid-August, there were 4,222 unfulfilled requests involving paper birth certificates. Those backlogged records don’t include birth records for new babies, which are digitized; there was no backlog for digitized certificates.
There were also 11,638 birth certificate amendment requests pending. These include amendments for adoptions and more, according to data shared with The News & Observer by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, where Vital Records is housed.
DHHS told The N&O that a lot of these delays are due to workforce challenges, as well as technological issues. But delays, exacerbated during the pandemic, have fallen dramatically over the past year, according to data provided by DHHS. And they may ease up further because of funding in this year’s budget to address shortfalls, the agency said.
Effects of delays on transgender people
Delays in receiving a paper copy of a birth certificate or amending a birth certificate make it hard to get a Social Security card or passport, and can affect filing taxes and more.
For Yoguez and her son, the wait of more than a year delayed getting her son an updated passport with the correct name for a trip to Colombia last summer. It also has delayed her son’s getting a learner’s permit to drive, as he wants it with the new name, she said.
Her son, she said, has had a “lot of anxiety” due to the delays. His old name, she said, doesn’t match his gender identity.
To avoid bureaucratic red tape and be able to travel to Colombia, Yoguez renewed her son’s expired passport with his old name. She said she’ll wait for the birth certificate before taking further action.
“Navigating this system is really a challenge for people who are not experts. And even for those of us who do this work all the time, it’s really challenging,” said Milan Pham, a Durham LGBTQ+, adoption and family lawyer at Nicholson Pham, Attorneys at Law, PLLC.
For transgender people, North Carolina no longer requires proof of a gender-affirming surgery to change the gender on their birth certificates. That process is now easier because of a court decision last year.
To get a name change, people have to get an order through the courts, which requires showing an original birth certificate.
Pham said “for North Carolinians who are looking for gender marker changes on their birth record or to reflect name changes on their birth records, there are intolerable delays that could be dangerous.”
These delays signify “a functional denial of your gender for the period that you don’t have proof of your gender on your birth record, your accurate gender on your birth record,” she said.
Delays also impact families with adopted members
Dana Davis Sikon’s husband adopted her 28-year-old son Gavin in February 2022 in Virginia. But her son was born in North Carolina, meaning that to obtain an amended birth certificate, he had to go through North Carolina’s vital records office. This amendment took 13 months, Sikon said.
Sikon said that due to her son not receiving his birth certificate he was unable to change information on his bank accounts, driver’s license and Social Security card, and the delay also affected his wedding plans, as he did not want to get married under his former last name.
Her other son, Noah, also adopted by her husband, was born in Virginia. He was able to go to the Virginia vital records office and the motor vehicle department all in one day. Within a week he had received his amended birth certificate, his new driver’s license, and was able to fill out the paperwork for the new Social Security card, Sikon said.
Sikon said she has life-threatening health conditions and her sons decided they wanted to have the same last name as her and her husband. “Me dying, they wanted all of us to have the same name,” she said.
Pham said her clients have run into up to a yearlong wait for Vital Records to issue a birth certificate that shows that their adoption has been processed. She said delays for adoption changes used to be approximately a month, “then it became three months and then it became longer.”
Pham said delays started taking up to six months or more some time during the pandemic. Other attorneys who spoke with the N&O also said that delays were exacerbated during the pandemic.
These delays can affect “all kinds of things,” Pham said, including children’s school enrollment.
Adoptions, in North Carolina, are formalized by the courts issuing a final adoption decree. This court order is what determines parentage, not the birth certificate, Pham said. But birth certificates, “popularly,” are “understood as that which proves parentage,” she said.
Many people “run into the failure of the general public to understand what constitutes legal parentage. Unless you want to haul your attorney around in your pocket to prove to school administrators that you’re a legal parent and that an adoption decree is better than a birth certificate in proving parentage, you’re still just dealing with the general public,” Pham said.
“People believe what it is they believe and they expect what it is they expect, and so it just adds an additional layer of difficulty for people who establish their families in certain kinds of ways,” she said.
Cause of delays
DHHS says these delays are largely because of workforce issues. It also says digitizing millions of birth certificates will help alleviate delays.
The agency said in August that the vacancy rate at Vital Records is at 40% — which translates to nearly one of every two positions being unfilled.
Since January 2022, Vital Records had been able to reduce wait times for several records, largely due to using one-time unspent funds carried forward from the past year, according to DHHS.
Now Vital Records has received $8 million in one-time money from the state budget to digitize vital records, which would help reduce delays further, DHHS said. State lawmakers agreed on a budget last month, weeks late, and Gov. Roy Cooper allowed it to become law this week.
By the start of next year, DHHS also said the state is on track to move birth records into the N.C. Database Application for Vital Events (NCDAVE), which currently hosts death records. The current system is the North Carolina Vital Records Application System (VRAS), which has digitized birth records from 1971 forward. Birth records before that are largely not digitized.
For requests involving paper records, “someone must first determine the location of the record, walk to one of our three vaults, identify the book containing the needed record, unscrew a large binder that contains hundreds of records, carefully remove and handle the document, re-screw the binder closed,” and repeat this until the request is fulfilled, said DHHS.
“Being reliant on paper, not digital, records creates inefficiencies, worsens our processing times and adds to our backlog. It also requires an onsite workforce that has been increasingly more difficult to recruit and retain,” DHHS said.
The agency said these workforce issues affect Vital Records’ ability to provide walk-in services, which were canceled in April 2020 and never resumed, and its ability to offer more appointment slots for the public.
Yoguez and Sikon both struggled for months to reach anyone on the phone. Both left negative Google reviews, with Yoguez only hearing back from Vital Records after her negative review, she said.
To address issues with calls by the public not being picked up, Vital Records has changed to a new phone system which tracks dropped calls, DHHS said.
If a record is not digitized, then to make an amendment, the physical record needs to be pulled.
People can also request certain birth records through county offices. And while amendments to birth certificates are handled by the state, there is a lot of back and forth between counties and the vital records office to make sure any amendments are reflected on both ends, and that necessary proof for changes has been provided. Having the records not digitized makes this back and forth more lengthy, said Susan Lockridge, Gaston County register of deeds.
DHHS estimates the $8 million should be enough to digitize all birth records prior to 1971 but that an additional appropriation would be needed to digitize other records, such as marriage and divorce records.
How long are delays?
Delays vary by procedure. According to DHHS, between January 2022 and August 2023:
Processing time for requests for digitized certificates went from one year to 30 days. The processing time for requests for nondigitized, or paper, certificates went from 13 months to 4.5 months.
Processing time for requests for general birth amendments, which are amendments that do not include requests for court-ordered name changes, paternities, and “legitimations” involving the children of unmarried parents, went from two years to three months.
Processing time for requests for in-state adoptions went from 2.5 years to three months.
Processing time for out-of-state adoptions was greater than three months in August. DHHS did not provide a more exact number after a follow-up request.
The total number of digitized (5.6 million) and nondigitized (5.5 million) birth records in August were nearly the same.
What is the backlog?
As of mid-August, here’s how many birth certificate requests were awaiting processing.
Nondigitized certificates: 4,222
Digitized certificates: No backlog
For amendment requests:
Birth amendments: 250
Adoption requests, in-state: 820
Adoption requests, out of state: 400
Adoption requests, foreign-born adoptions: 23
Legitimations: 95
Paternities: 6,500
Court orders: 3,550
