I agree that your suggestion of some sort of official, permanent point of contact would be better. However, even with the proviso that you have to keep paying for a service to retain it, it seems to me that some sort of regulation giving the current user of a particular ID first refusal over renewing it and a clear warning before they lose access to it would be beneficial. Possibly some restriction on reusing the same ID for anyone else within a reasonable period, say a few years, would also be a good idea. The fact is that these IDs are being used for sensitive, important, often government-sanctioned purposes already, and protecting them as such is surely an improvement on the status quo.