The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) on Tuesday said the government has pushed back the rollout of the public online registration for Step 1 of the Philippine Identification System (PhilSys).
National Statistician Claire Dennis S. Mapa told the BusinessMirror that the public could start registering for Step 1 of the National ID starting April 30. The initial plan was to allow the public to start Step 1 registration online in March.
Step 1 involves obtaining demographic information and setting up the Step 2 appointment schedule for households. Currently, this step is being done manually by PSA through enumerators going around areas with low Covid-19 cases.
“The online registration system is currently undergoing the security audit by our security consultants. We want to make sure we have a secured system prior to the launch of the online Step 1 registration,” Mapa told the BusinessMirror on Tuesday.
Mapa said this has not affected the number of households registered under Step 1. He said as of April 11, house-to-house step 1 registration reached 18.28 million individuals.
He said for the first quarter alone, some 17.34 million Filipinos were registered, exceeding the 14.9-million target by 2.44 million for the January-to-March period.
For Step 2, which covers biometric data capture, Mapa said 3.28 million registrants were registered as of April 11.
“Card personalization quality assurance test is also ongoing at the BSP [Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas] East Avenue Complex. Once cleared, we will have the printing of the cards to be delivered to the registrants,” Mapa said.
Step 2 Registration, on the other hand, includes the validation of supporting documents and capture of biometric information, such as fingerprints, iris scans, and front-facing photographs at registration centers as per the registrants’ appointments, is currently taking place in 32 priority provinces.
PSA intends to ramp up operations for the Step 2 PhilSys Registration on a gradual, small-scale basis. As of February 23, all priority provinces have at least one registration center in operation.
The Step 3 Registration, as the third and final step, is the issuance of the PhilSys Number (PSN) and the physical ID or the PhilID.
The PSN is a randomly generated number and will serve as a permanent identification number for every registrant used for digital transactions.
PSA partnered with PHLPost for the delivery of the PSN and PhilID to successful registrants.
‘Instrumental’
The National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) said PhilSys, or the national ID program, would be “instrumental” for the country’s human capital development amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Acting Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick T. Chua recently said the National ID will have three use cases such as for emergency subsidies; strengthening financial inclusion; and facilitating efficient vaccine distribution for the general population.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed several institutional weaknesses, including the difficulty in identifying beneficiaries for social programs and the lack of bank accounts for the efficient distribution of subsidies. Given this, the President gave the directive to accelerate the implementation of the PhilSys. We aim to register 50 to 70 million individuals by the end of the year,” Chua said.
The Neda chief explained that the government has established a three-step registration process to safely rollout PhilSys amid the pandemic and meet social distancing requirements.
Based on the 2019 Financial Inclusion Survey of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, 51.2 million Filipinos, or 71 percent of the total adult population, do not have a bank account. The same survey found that the lack of documentary requirements contributes to the factors why most Filipinos remain unbanked.