Tech boosts LRA fight vs corruption, red tape
The lack of trust and the “sentimental value” of the old titles to the holders hamper the LRA efforts
To reduce bureaucratic red tape and corruption, the Land Registration Authority (LRA) is pursuing a computerization project aimed at replacing old titles with electronic ones.
Lawyer Renato Bermejo, LRA administrator, said that the Land Titling Computerization Project was also in line with President Rodrigo Duterte’s ease of doing business program.
“This is also to improve the delivery of services of LRA and contribute to ease in doing business (program of the government),” Bermejo said.
Bermejo pointed out that the computerization process has three major stages — the manual scanning, encoding and the surrender of old titles.
So far, Bermejo said that 16 million titles have already been scanned manually.
“There were over 16 million titles scanned already. They transmitted the scanned titles to the central database of the LRA,” he explained.
“Please note that titles are not one-pager documents. If you are to visualize the task, 16 million titles multiplied by 2, 3, or 5 pages — we need to encode over 32 million pages,” Bermejo added.
After completing the two stages — scanning and encoding, Bermejo said that the LRA faces the biggest challenge of convincing title holders to surrender their documents in exchange to the electronic titles.
“The participation of a registered landowner is to return the title in his position. We will replace this with an electronic title,” said Bermejo.
“We are practically on the third stage which is to convince the transacting public to return their title for upgrading to electronic title,” he added.
The LRA administrator admitted that the third phase is the most difficult stage.
“This is actually very difficult, it takes time. As of this present, after our roadshows and advertisements, 28.54 percent or 4.7 million titles already surrendered. We already upgraded their titles to electronic title,” said Bermejo, adding “we still have 71.46 percent or 11.9 million titles in a paper title status.”
Bermejo acknowledged that the lack of trust in the computerization project and the “sentimental value” of the old titles to the holders hamper the LRA efforts.
“The bigger factor is a lack of trust,” the LRA administrator said.