In Victoria, AU if you don't have a copy of your full birth certificate by the age of 21, it can be very difficult to get one -- if you are under 21, then a parent can help, but not if you reach 21. The births, deaths and marriages department will take "copies" of documents, but the driving license authority (Vic Roads) will not accept any document unless it is a bonafide original; it can't even be a certified copy! Ordinarily a certified copy of a document can be done by a member of the local police force or a justice of the peace and it is generally well accepted in place of originals. So, if you haven't got a learner's or driver's license for a motor vehicle and you have limited access to proper original documents, then it might be impossible to fix. As to electronic signatures, I've always thought it was a joke to accept an image from a computer file as a signature or a rubber stamp of your signature. I think the only valid way with paper documents is to use a pen and sign it in person with a valid witness, anything less is always going to be questionable from a contract perspective. Proper electronic signing can be an issue too as anybody can create a GPG key pair for any "email address" they like and if it doesn't pass the web of trust then it will still likely be accepted... and the WOT is flawed in itself as people will sign any old key just like they click okay, okay, okay during an installation and install malware that they were even told about by simply clicking through. In the electronic age, you still get asked for a letter head for a business, which most people never have these days. Just about anything can be dodgied up if you need it, especially in the world of PDfs that are over trusted to be bonafide, but they are just a plain old electronic computer file with a source that is easily adjusted in most cases. Photoshopping is also a very real thing. Heck, these days you can't even trust a video with a voice of someone you "know" ... http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43639704