Jerusalem, 17 February, 2026 (TPS-IL) — When Israelis need documents recognized abroad — to obtain a foreign passport, a professional license, or have a marriage approved overseas — they rely on a government stamp. A state audit released Tuesday by the State Comptroller’s Office found that the stamp has largely been issued without anyone verifying what it is supposed to certify.
The report, authored by State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman, details systemic failures in Israel’s administration of the apostille — an internationally recognized authentication stamp used under the 1961 Hague Convention to verify official documents for use abroad. An apostille is a government-issued stamp certifying that a document is genuine, allowing it to be accepted as legally valid in any of the 127 signatory countries, which are entitled to rely on it without further verification.
Israel designated the Foreign Ministry as the primary authority for issuing apostilles when it joined the convention in 1977, a responsibility that has expanded sharply as demand more than doubled over the past decade, reaching more than 323,000 certificates in 2024 alone. The State Comptroller’s report found that Israel has been issuing these stamps in ways that fundamentally undermine the trust on which the system depends. The State Comptroller regularly reviews Israel’s preparedness and the effectiveness of government policies.
At the heart of the problem is a failure to compare signatures. The convention requires that before issuing an apostille, the competent authority verify the authenticity of the signature or seal on the document against specimens on file. The Foreign Ministry has a dedicated computer system, called “Imutim,” for this purpose. Auditors found that 45 percent of authorized government signatories in the system have no specimen signature on file. Between January 2022 and June 2024, the ministry issued 160,294 apostilles on manually signed documents without being able to perform the required comparison — roughly half of all apostilles in that category.
More troubling, auditors observing the process found that even when a specimen signature was present in the system, staff did not look at it. In one documented case, an apostille was issued even though the signature on the document visibly did not match the specimen on file. Staff told investigators that the practice was simply to check whether the signatory’s name appeared in the system — nothing more. In total, 77 percent of all apostilles issued during the audit period — more than 529,000 certificates — were issued without any signature or seal comparison whatsoever.
“This conduct reflects a serious failure that could undermine the reliance of signatory countries on not receiving apostille certificates for forged documents,” Englman’s office wrote.
The report also found that the ministry was issuing apostilles on photocopies of Population Registry documents printed on plain white paper, lacking security features such as watermarks and state emblems designed to make forgery detectable.
The public service failures are equally stark.
Despite demand exceeding 323,000 requests annually, in-person service is available only at the Foreign Ministry’s Jerusalem office, for three and a half hours a day, mornings only. An online appointment system was abolished in August 2024 after private couriers monopolized all available slots — every batch of monthly appointments was being claimed in under two minutes, with 72 percent booked by individuals reserving ten or more slots. The audit cited testimony given to the Knesset by the ministry’s deputy director-general for consular affairs. “They simply take all the appointments,” he told lawmakers in July 2024. “In almost no cases did regular people manage to get one.”
The result is that citizens nationwide are forced to hire couriers charging between NIS 300-1,000 ($96-$322) per document — up to 25 times the NIS 40 ($12) statutory fee. Auditors estimated Israelis paid at least NIS 50 million ($16.1 million) in courier fees in 2023 alone.
Englman called on the Foreign Ministry to overhaul the authentication process from the ground up — establishing written procedures, completing its signatory database, and ensuring staff actually compare signatures before issuing certificates. He also demanded the ministry end its practice of pre-printing apostille certificates in batches, and stop issuing them on printed copies of digitally signed documents.
He also urged the Foreign Ministry to enforce its own ten-document limit equally against couriers, end their preferential access to service windows, and shut down the informal cash trade in government fees that auditors observed taking place outside the ministry’s gates.
On the broader system, Englman urged the Justice Ministry to accelerate the rollout of digital apostilles and publicly disclose which countries do not accept them, and called on the National Digital Unit to urgently fix the security failures found in government self-service kiosks nationwide.
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