As the government has continued to fail over the past five years to provide identification cards that it claims to be “essential,” President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has agreed to a digital national identification system for the meantime.
Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan, head of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) and its attached Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), said the President agreed to go digital amid the PSA’s failure to meet its implementation target. “There have been some delays, but the problems are being addressed,” he said.
A national ID card is required of every Filipino citizen under the Philippine Identification System Act (Republic Act No. 11055), which was enacted into law in 2018, with a five-year implementation period. The PSA was supposed to collect personal data as well as produce and distribute ID cards.
“But now, that has changed. We realized that we should first make those digital IDs so that anyone who has a phone can already use the digital ID and that is now the primary responsibility of the DICT (Department of Information and Communications Technology),” Balisacan explained.
“There’s now an agreement between the PSA and the DICT to transfer the provision of digital ID to DICT while PSA will continue with its physical ID production and distribution,” he added.
He said that after five years, the government is more than halfway in the production of the physical IDs and wants to speed up the distribution before the year ends.
He added that with the ID, financial assistance such as cash aid for disaster victims and indigents and the recently launched food stamp program of the social welfare department could be delivered efficiently.
As the government still tries to implement the national identification system, creative solutions will be necessary, especially with the deadline already approaching and the production of physical IDs still lagging behind at only more than 50 percent done. Going digital is certainly an option, but considering the billions that have already been spent over the past five years, it would be good for Filipinos to be able to see that our government is capable of achieving simple goals with reasonable timelines.*
