DAVAO CITY -- The Land Registration Authority (LRA) has urged property owners anew to secure the digitized copies of their original land titles to ensure fast and safe transactions, and easy and reliable retrieval of the authentic copies.
LRA Administrator Renato Bermejo said during an online interview here that, in doing so, property owners would avoid being victimized by fraudsters and corrupt government personnel.
Bermejo said property owners would only need to surrender their original titles to the LRA so that the agency could migrate the original title into digitized form. .
He said digitizing the land titles would assure the owner of a secured computerized copy of the authentic title.
“These computerized titles would also curb corruption and red tape in the agency, as this would gradually erase the risk of the hard copies of these titles to having burned or damaged while placed in old vaults prone to having ruined,” he said.
Bermejo said property owners should now register for the verification of their titles not merely for computerization, but because they regularly use these instruments for business transactions.
“You should have these documents verified now because it is burdensome to look for them as we keep these in a storeroom,” he said.
He said of the 16.6 million titles nationwide in 2019, only about 28.54 percent of these have been computerized.
Many of those who had their titles computerized were property owners who had existing estate settlement or ongoing transactions involving, or requiring land titles.
Bermejo said property owners may still need “to shell an amount” to secure these computerized titles saying that these electronic documents are legal instruments that are not prone to being damaged.
He also said the national government has designated the computerization program of land titles to a private contractor which requires a fee for the entire process.
“At present, it is more challenging to find out whether titles with hard copies are fake because there are titles that looked like the original ones,” he said.
“That is what we have been expounding and people rarely understand (this),” Bermejo added.
He pointed out that the use of hard copy titles invites corruption because some employees of the agency would either sit on the request for these titles to be recovered in the absence of grease money.
“The problem inside is that to deal with it, you need to pay. That is the nature of corruption inside,” he said.
The official said that some employees even hide these titles.
He said the LRA was also facing the problem of regional offices that do not have the number of employees, making it burdensome for these offices to attend to the requests like many other government agencies. This would open the way for employees to mulct those who require to get certified authentic copies of their titles.
Bermejo said he could not dismiss these employees because government has placed due diligence mechanisms to ensure that it protects every employee.