The birth certificates for many family members from my home country contain the wrong birthday, often off by as much as two weeks. Some registrars registered all births as having taken place in the provincial capitol, instead of the town of actual birth. In one case, a town registrar had decided that for a particular year all girls were to be named after flowers (e.g., Rose, Petunia) and colours a following year (e.g., Violet, Amber), completely disregarding the names chosen by their parents. One town registrar went to University and had learnt the then brand new spelling for one of the country's unofficial languages -- a spelling standard that 50 years later has still not taken hold, thus, for example, Steven was spellt Stiivan and James was spellt Jiemz. Another registrar had invented her own peculiar spelling rules, thus Yvette became Ivet and Gene became Djine.
When, in adulthood, people wanted to travel and needed birth certificates to obtain passports, they would discover these issues, often well into their 20s and 30s. And since it is almost impossible to correct these records back home, my family members were stuck with their new names, dates and places of birth. So, many of my family are called by one name by everyone in the country they now call home, and by another by their family members. They celebrate two birthdays, one with the people in their new country, the other with their family members (because we know the true birthday, and explaining that the official birthday is wrong can cause more problems than it's worth).
All of us have had to apply for immigration status in our new homes using the names, birth dates and birth places listed on our birth certificates, even if they are wrong. The certificates are impossible to correct and immigration officials are not interested in "your" truths -- they only believe what's on the documentation.
The bottom line is, although inconvenient, these "facts" are immaterial. One is no different, no less worthy, no less honourable, and no less profitable because data points like birth name, birth date and birth place are incorrect in the documented record. This is all the more true when the person in question did not even know that the data points on their documentation were inaccurate.
Let's hope politicians don't use this to revoke immigration status and deport people to gain political points, as was done in one famous Dutch case (i.e., Rita Verdonk's revocation of citizenship, and subsequent deportation, of fellow parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali).
