Abu Dhabi: Express courier service company Empost said it could not deliver 14,118 ID cards to customers because of problems in reaching them.
Some of the cards pending delivery date back to October 2010, a top executive told Gulf News.
About 11,114 cards could not be delivered due to no-response from customers, said Empost CEO Sultan Al Midfa.
Empost was assigned to deliver the ID cards in 2007. As Gulf News reported earlier, Empost stopped accepting new ID cards from the Emirates Identitty Authority (Emirates ID) since January 27 to clear the backlog.
Al Midfa said some of the customers "who did not respond to Empost" were found to have left the country and a few of them have died.
"Some of their mobile phones were constantly busy or swithed off and some others requested to keep the card with us as they would collect it from our counters," he exaplained.
About 3,000 cards could not be delivered due to wrong address or contact numbers given by the ID card applicants, the CEO said.
"In all our hubs, approximately 3,000 cards are of such 'dead cases', where we are unable to establish contact with the customer [because they gave] a wrong, incomplete or non-working [contact] number, " he explained.
Although Empost has the capacity to deliver 6,000 to 7,000 cards per day in normal cases, it was delivering just 170 pending cards per day last week due to the above mentioned problems, Al Midfa disclosed. "This is incomparable to our real capacity," he said.
Because of such problems, it is difficult to say how many days it will take to clear the backlog, the CEO said.
"The cards [of customers who gave] wrong [contact] numbers and customers being not available pose huge problems," he said. It usually takes Empost three days to deliver ID cards.
