The number of people wrongly identified as criminals has become more than double because of blunders committed by the Criminal Records Bureau, making innocents to face career problems.

In spite of forceful demands to improve its performance, 1,570 people were wrongly branded criminals or mistakenly given a clean record.

Errors doubled in the year to March 31 as in the previous year 680 people were branded criminals erroneously.

Victims of the vetting must make an appeal to get their names cleared. But even after getting their names cleared, they may be barred from working in the public sector.

More than 3.9 million certificates were processed by the CRB last year, a rise of 500,000 and the highest figure science CRB came into existence.

The figures reported by The Daily Telegraph, are an embarrassment for the home office.

On the other hand, ministers have planned to widely raise the number of CRB checks.

The CRB was created in March, 2002, to scrutinize applicants for sensitive jobs such as teachers, nurses etc.