A recent report has revealed that the NamUS service, which has been around for some time now and promises to be one of the better tools available for medical examiners and family members looking to identify missing people, is not used by a whopping 93% of law enforcement agencies. It has been discovered that only 1,100 of the country's agencies, out of a total 17,000, are registered with NamUS, which is a mere 6.5%.

Since the past year, families and medical examiners have been given complete access to a free online database that has specifically been designed to help with the identification of over 40,000 sets of unidentified remains from across the nation. The service has been dubbed as "NamUS", which is short for National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

The main purpose of the program is to allow both the parties to enter some identifying characteristics of a person who has gone missing or an unidentified body, in hopes that the sharing of information would help match a face to the bodies and remains lying unidentified.

It seems that there are many law enforcement agencies that do not even know that the service exists to begin with, and there are some that are more leery about using the limited resources they have to be a part of the service.

"As these cases become more well known, as people learn about the successes of NamUS, more and more agencies are going to want to be part of it", said Kristina Rose, Acting Director of the National Institute of Justice at the Justice Department.