Over the past 4-5 years, the Government of Nepal, with support from a World Bank project, and with reference to new civil registration laws, has been promoting, employing, and maintaining an online civil registration system. The online system has replaced the previous handwritten-based administrative practices to register vital life events, including birth, marriage, death, divorce, and migration, and to provide relevant certificates. This paper traces the translation of the new laws into the online system and suggests that this is an iterative process. When conducting civil registration for individual citizens, local-level officers would sometimes have problems inputting specific information into the pre-designed templates and default choices in the system. Or, they might come across issues that the laws didn’t take into consideration at the time of drafting and therefore are not represented in the system designing. Upon receiving feedback from the local level, officials and IT engineers in the federal government would need to provide extra legal interpretations, clarify the language or specify the situations originally defined in the laws, and sometimes adjust the system accordingly. Based on fieldwork in different levels of government offices in Nepal, this paper unravels the tensions between the laws on paper, the online system, and everyday bureaucratic practices. Unpacking these tensions, this paper argues, would provide an interesting window to understand the inner workings of the state.