Floridians are facing delays in obtaining death certificates for deceased loved ones as state officials respond to a potential cyberattack, creating holdups in funeral arrangements and sparking fears of backups of burials and cremations.
The state’s electronic system used to issue the records has been offline for over a week, leaving funeral homes scrambling and returning to pen and paper to complete required forms.
“It was all electronically done,” Tom Hanneken, operations manager at Osceola Memory Gardens, said Monday. “Now, it is back to the old way we did it.”
The Florida Department of Health, which maintains the online Vital Records system, did not respond to an email and phone message seeking comment on Monday.
The Tampa Bay Times reported Wednesday a hacker group claimed to have breached the Health Department’s computer system, gaining access to potentially sensitive information. Florida prohibits state agencies from paying ransom demands in cyberattacks. The health department press secretary told the paper the Vital Statistics system, handling birth and death records, was affected.
Timothy E. Kitchens, president of the Florida Morticians Association, said state officials have not told him what caused the outage or when it could be fixed.
The system allows death records to be registered online, sending the forms electronically to physicians for their approval.
With the system down, some grieving families are having to wait longer to obtain official documents needed for cremations and to receive life insurance payments for burials, Kitchens said.
One of his funeral home’s clients is facing a delay in transporting their loved one to Africa for a funeral because they are waiting for the required documents to be finalized.
Complicating the process is funeral home staff now need to make multiple trips to complete the forms, he said.
“You have to physically take the form to the physician wherever they may be,” said Kitchens, who owns a funeral home in Riviera Beach. “After that is signed, you take that same form to the Bureau of Vital Statistics.”
Funeral directors could face even more backlogs if they must continue to wait for death records needed for cremations or to transport bodies for out-of-state burials, said Juhan Mixon, executive director of the Independent Funeral Directors of Florida.
“It slows down the entire process,” he said. “We are having to hire extra staff to track down doctors to sign death certificates, so we can cremate or ship them out.”