41 M Pinoys complete nat’l ID registration

Filipinos completely registered in the Philippine Identification System (PhilSys) have reached 41 million or 82 percent of the target population for 2021, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported yesterday.

In an interview on Cignal TV’s One News, PSAAssistant Secretary and Deputy Statistician Rosalinda Bautista said the government is on track to hit its target of 50 million PhilSys registrants for the year.

“We are already at 41 million as of Nov. 4. We have six to seven weeks to work on the remaining nine million and we also expect people to do online registration,” Bautista said.

She said the 41 million registrants are those who completed Step 2 in the PhilSys process, which involves demographic information and capturing of biometric data, such as fingerprints, iris scans and front-facing photographs.

By the end of President Duterte’s term in June next year, the PSA targets to have finished registering 90 million Filipinos.

As the national ID is geared toward financial inclusion, especially among low income households, Bautista said the PSA and Land Bank of the Philippines managed to get some 5.9 million registrants onboard to open their own bank accounts for the first time.

This was done through Landbank’s co-location with the PSA in designated PhilSys registration centers nationwide. Registrants can also download and open an account through Landbank’s e-wallet account.

With this, Filipinos can use their transaction accounts to withdraw cash, perform cashless transactions, do tap payments, shop online and receive government subsidies.

Bautista admitted that one of the complaints against the PhilSys is the delivery of physical ID cards.

“After Step 2, validation takes some time before the PhilSys number can be provided. But once that is generated, the ID will be personalized and be subjected to multiple checks,” she said.

The national IDs are being produced by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) with a production capacity of 80,000 IDs per day. These are then delivered by PhilPost on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, of the five million ID cards dispatched, only three million have been actually delivered to their owners.

“We have a backlog of 1.9 million and we ask for the patience and understanding of our registrants on this,” Bautista said.

As the delivery of the IDs continues to face delays, the PSA will start rolling out the PhilSys mobile ID, an alternative version of the physical ID within the year.