Hong Kong's Duplicate Image Problem: Why Sloppy Digital Records Are Costing Residents Time and Money

Thousands of Hong Kong residents are losing hours — and in some cases hundreds of dollars in professional fees — to a problem that sounds mundane until it happens to you: duplicate image files clogging the digital databases they rely on every day. Scanned documents appearing twice, sometimes under different reference numbers, have been reported across systems managed by the Lands Registry, the Hospital Authority, and several district offices, according to records requests filed under the Code on Access to Information.

The timing matters. Hong Kong's government has spent the past three years pushing a sweeping digitalisation agenda under the Digital Policy Office, established in 2023, with the explicit goal of cutting bureaucratic friction for residents and businesses. Duplicate records are a direct threat to that ambition. When a solicitor on Des Voeux Road Central runs a title search and pulls up two versions of the same conveyance document — each with a slightly different file stamp — she cannot simply pick one. She has to flag it, wait for clarification, and charge her client accordingly. That bill lands on ordinary families trying to buy flats in Tuen Mun or Sham Shui Po.

Where the Problem Shows Up Most

The Lands Registry's IRIS online platform, which handles property document searches across Hong Kong's 18 districts, is one pressure point. Legal professionals working out of offices in Central and Sheung Wan have noted cases where documents scanned during a 2021–2022 backlog-clearance drive were uploaded without deduplication checks. The Hong Kong Law Society flagged related data-quality concerns in a submission to the government in late 2024, though the Society did not specify the scale of the problem in public documents available at the time of writing.

The Hospital Authority's electronic patient record system, shared across facilities including Queen Mary Hospital in Pok Fu Lam and Prince of Wales Hospital in Sha Tin, faces a different but related issue. When patients transfer between clusters, imaging files — X-rays, MRI scans — occasionally duplicate rather than migrate cleanly. The practical consequence is that clinicians spend additional time reconciling records rather than treating patients. The Authority has publicly committed to upgrading its clinical management system, with a new platform rollout scheduled to begin in phases from 2025 onwards, but residents in the interim are advised to carry their own printed imaging reports to appointments.

Duplicate image data also affects smaller, street-level transactions. The Buildings Department's online submission portal, used by contractors and architects filing plans for renovation works in districts from Yau Ma Tei to Aberdeen, has seen instances where supporting photographs are stored in duplicate, inflating file sizes and slowing download speeds for users on standard broadband connections. In a city where a standard government broadband e-service subscription runs at around HK$200 per month for small businesses, the wasted time compounds into a real cost.

What Residents Can Do Now

The Digital Policy Office has published a framework for reporting data anomalies through its iAM Smart platform, which as of early 2026 had registered more than 4 million accounts across Hong Kong. Residents who encounter duplicated documents during Lands Registry or Buildings Department searches can lodge a formal discrepancy report through the respective agency's online feedback portal — a step most people skip because it is not prominently advertised on the search results page itself.

Legal and property professionals recommend screenshotting any duplicate file reference numbers at the point of discovery and including them in any professional correspondence, which creates a paper trail if a transaction is delayed. The Hong Kong Institute of Surveyors has circulated guidance to members on this point, though its internal circulars are not publicly available.

The broader fix requires the government to mandate deduplication protocols before upload — a technical requirement, not an exotic one, that cities including Singapore incorporated into their land registry digitisation projects years ago. Until Hong Kong does the same, residents will keep absorbing a cost that is invisible in the headline statistics but very visible on their lawyers' invoices.