Switzerland
Since the introduction of a national pension scheme in 1948, most persons resident in Switzerland are allocated a social security number (AHV-Nr. / No AVS ), which is now also used for various other governmental purposes. The eleven-digit format in use since 1968 is of the form AAA.BB.CCC.DDD and encodes information about the name, birthdate and sex of its holder:
- The "AAA" digits encode the family name.
- The "BB" digits are equal to the last two digits of the year of birth.
- The "CCC" digits encode the birth day as a trimester number (1-4) followed by the number of the day in the trimester (e.g. 101 is January 1).
- The "DDD" digits are used to be an origin code depending which country the person came from and or if this person was a Swiss citizen through birth or naturalisation.
As of 2008, a new, anonymous thirteen-digit number is being issued to all Swiss residents. It is of the form 756.XXXX.XXXX.XY, where 756 is the ISO 3166-1 code for Switzerland, XXXX.XXXX.X is a random number and Y is a EAN-13 check digit.
Read more about this topic: National Identification Number
Famous quotes containing the word switzerland:
“I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”
—Orson Welles (1915–84)