.
By Bernadette D. Nicolas, October 30 2018; Business Mirror
Image Credit to Philippine Statistics Authority
THE Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) is now targeting only 6 million registrants for 2019 for the Philippine National ID System (PhilSys) since the agency was not given the funds under the National Expenditure Program (NEP) to meet the previous target of 25 million.
The Department of Budget and Management only approved P2 billion under the NEP.
“We were not given in NEP 2019 the budget we need to enroll 25 million,” PSA National Statistician Lisa Grace S. Bersales told the BusinessMirror in a message.
To be able to fund the registration of 25 million, the PSA had previously said it needs an additional P4.2 billion.
Although they were not able to get the budget that they want under NEP for 2019, she said they are still expecting to enroll 106 million Filipinos by 2023.
From 2020 to 2023, Bersales said they will be asking for about P7 billion per year to enroll 25 million individuals annually.
Starting January next year, the PSA will be conducting the test for the proof of concept with Philippine Postal Corp. (PhilPost) during the registration of 1 million households under the unconditional cash transfer scheme program of Department of Social Welfare and Development.
“This is to test the system and the processes that we have already crafted for the Philippine Identification System. This proof of concept, we say is end to end, which is, we will [conduct the] test, registration, validation, all the processes in between up to the issuance of the PhilID, the national ID card,” she said, adding that they are partnering with PhilPost since it has actually been doing registration for the members of the Social Security System for the Unified Multi-Purpose Identification System.
Next week, Bersales also announced that they will be inviting bids for the proof of concept.
They will also be expanding the coverage of proof of concept to other regions.
This is different from what the PSA announced before. It said earlier it will limit the registration of 1 million unconditional cash transfer beneficiaries for the proof of concept to just three regions, namely, Cordillera Administrative Region, Calabarzon and the National Capital Region.
“After the proof of concept is tested for about six months, we will learn from what happened and adjust any—or make any adjustments on the technical specifications and other processes for PhilSys, then next year we will do the procurement of the full PhilSys system learning from the proof of concept,” she said.
The procurement process for the full system of PhilSys is expected to start by February 2019 and end by July.
By September next year, they are targeting to start the full-scale registration of 5 million registrants.
By 2020, the registration of overseas Filipino workers, in coordination with the Department Foreign Affairs, will also start.
The PhilID is expected to expedite applications for the availment of government services and benefits and tax-related transactions, opening of bank accounts and transactions for employment purposes, among others.
Under the law, the PhilID will contain the registrant’s biometric information, along with seven demographic data, such as full name, sex, date of birth, place of birth, blood type, address, nationality and three optional information, specifically, marital status, mobile number and e-mail address.
The PSA has since ensured that they will keep the privacy of citizens secure. Bersales said they will be doing a privacy impact assessment every year.
“So through these evaluation measures, we will know if there is a need to do some changes to the ID specification,” she said.
