BACOLOD CITY (PIA)—The Philippine government aims to release about 50 million national identification under the Philippine Identification System Act (PhilSys) by the end of 2022.
Negros Occidental Chief Statistical Specialist Luis Gonzales said 30 million of that will be in the plastic card form while 20 million will be in the printable form.
The printable form is a special paper containing a citizen’s QR code and demographic data which is in lieu of the usual plastic ID, he added.
He said a successful pilot test was already done and if things push through, it will start by October this year.
The volume of national IDs to be printed in the card form proved to be a huge task requiring a longer time to deliver, Gonzales noted.
“The data of the registrants will undergo deduplication (removing of redundant data) process before assigning a permanent unique ID number and proceed to print,” he said.
Gonzales said the government’s goal is to register 92 million in step 2 by the end of 2022 and to register all citizens by 2024.
Negros Occidental, with an estimated population of 3,223,955 million including Bacolod City, had already registered 2,279,000 million in PhilSys ID.
Once in operation, the printing of IDs on paper in the province will be done in Bacolod City malls.
To avail of the national ID in printable form, interested citizens may bring their transaction slip given when they registered that contains their transaction number.
One can have a copy of their printed form ID once the Philippine Statistics Authority, through its system, verifies its availability online.
Gonzales warned though, that not everybody can have their printed national ID as it may not be available yet.
Meanwhile, the PhilSys registration continues with the PSA now focusing on children 5 to 14 years old because they were the ones who weren’t able to go out during the height of the pandemic. (AAL/Lljr/PIA 6 Negros Occidental)
