PSA on track to register Pinoys despite encoding errors

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) is on track to hit its target of registering Filipinos in the Philippine Identification System (PhilSys) despite errors in encoding data, according to one of the agency’s officials.

“We are almost at 80 million (registered Filipinos),” PSA registration officer Baby Jean Alid told The STAR.

The PSA targets to register 18.19 million Filipinos in the first quarter of the year.

Meanwhile, the PSA clarified that the reported number of errors on the encoded data may have been “exaggerated.”

Alid explained that while they received a lot of complaints regarding errors in the information encoded in IDs, these are minimal.

“We don’t have the data, but it is not a lot,” she said in Filipino and English.

The PSA, however, will still conduct an updating of data to correct the errors, which might have come from the documents submitted by the registrants or during the encoding process.

Alid said that in the final step of registration, registrants are given the opportunity to view the encoded information for validation before finishing the registration process.

The updating will take place after all have been fully registered in PhilSys.

“Our target is that all Filipinos will be provided a foundational ID system,” Alid said.

As to the issuance of a physical copy of the ID, she said the PSA could not give a reason for the delay.

“The issuance of the physical copy is not under our mandate. We are only tasked to do the registration,” she added.

Printing of the physical ID is under the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas while delivery is done by the Philippine Postal Office.

The PSA, however, issues an ePhilID, a digital version of the national ID which holds the same validity as that of the physical ID as a solution to its delayed delivery.

The PSA also said the deduplication process for the PhilSys is moving and not stagnant.

Deduplication is one of eight steps of the PhilSys registration process before the ID is released. It is during this step that PSA will check if there is duplication or errors in the presented proof of identification.

“We are thoroughly verifying the data, but we are moving and not stagnant,” Alid said.

The PSA noted that there is no concrete number as to how many they are deduplicating in a day because the process is ongoing.