PSA: Delivery of physical national IDs to be completed in September 2024
As printers catch up with volume, it will be a year before the Filipinos registered in the Philippine Identification System (PhilSys), receive their physical cards.
According to National Statistician Claire Dennis Mapa there are 81 million Filipinos registered in the PhilSys. This is equivalent to 81% the population over the age of five, 85% the population above the age of 15, and 65% the Filipinos aged between five and 14.
Less than half of the registered users, 39.7 millions, have received physical identification cards. The remaining 41.2 have only received printed paper or ePhilID.
Mapa explained that the backlog stems from the fact that the printing capacity of the cards is limited to 80,000 cards a day. The spike in registration dates back to 2021, when as many as 250,000 Filipinos signed up for the system.
“‘Yung adjustment is really to increase the capacity of the printer, so parang you have more volume in the registration, but the printer capacity was pegged at about 80,000. So that is the catch-up plan that we are actually talking with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP),” he said in a Senate hearing.
“Based on their schedule as presented to us, they will clear everything by September of 2024,” he added, noting that the printing will continue to operate on a first-in, first-out basis.
The PSA program aims to register 101 millions Filipinos in total by 2024. A budget of P1.6 billion is requested for this year.
The former president Rodrigo Duterte passed the national identification law into law in August 2018. He wanted to harmonize the government IDs that were redundant, integrate them, and connect them into a single, integrated system.
President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. in July said PhilSys will be at the forefront of his administration’s digital transformation agenda.
Ivan John Uy of the Department of Information and Communications Technology said earlier in this month that Marcos Jr. is impatient about the delays with the release of national identifications. The DICT will be looking into the issue.
Uy said that she was confident a large number of digital IDs would be released before the end of this calendar year. —KG, GMA Integrated News
