Marcos growing impatient at promises on nat’l ID

PAPER ID A congressional worker shows a sample of the PhilSys ID presented to the House of Representatives. —INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

As the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) asked Congress for a P300-million kitty for an already-funded task of the police, Secretary Ivan John Uy conceded that the agency is nowhere near a solution to the five-year-old problem of national identification cards.

In a press briefing in Malacañang on Wednesday, Uy admitted that even President Marcos is growing impatient at the continuing delays in the Philippine Statistics Authority’s (PSA) issuance of the digital ID cards, mandated by Republic Act No. 11055 (Philippine Identification System Act) passed in 2018.

Uy met with the President and other concerned agencies on the law’s implementation on Tuesday, but they only discussed further delays.

Mr. Marcos tasked Uy to figure out how to solve the problem and deploy a national digital ID that can be loaded on people’s mobile phones. The agency took months to come up with a deployment plan.

“Our objective is, hopefully we’ll have a nice Christmas gift for our countrymen by the end of the year: that we significantly deploy the digital IDs,” Uy said. “Within months, we will do our best to be able to deploy the digital ID system.”

Uy said the DICT has to make sure that the data collected by the PSA are not corrupted or incomplete. The PSA has so far captured data on about 80 million individual Filipinos.

“So, for us to be able to convert it to a digital format, we need access to that database so that we can deploy it on a digital platform,” he added.

“That was the discussion and that was what we reported to the President as to how we are going to adopt it on a digital platform so that it can eventually be used for all our online transactions,” he said.

The DICT chief reiterated the benefits of a national identification system—the same arguments the government made when the idea was first proposed in the 1990s.

READ: DICT vows safeguards for digital national ID