House Deputy Speaker and TUCP Party-list Rep. Raymond Mendoza believes that indigent jobseekers should be entitled to a 20 percent discount when applying for government clearances.

Mendoza’s House Bill (HB) 5553 or the “Poor Job Applicants Discount Bill” seeks to do just that for impoverished job applicants.

“In a lower middle-income country such as the Philippines where 18.1 percent of the population of 19.99 million Filipinos live below the poverty threshold, the importance and urgency of crafting a law providing poor job applicants with the much-needed discount in the fees and charges for pre-employment application documentary requirements cannot be understated," Mendoza wrote in his measure.

"For one, PSA’s (Philippine Statistics Authority) food poverty threshold for a family of five in 2021 was only P8,379, hence merely P18.62 per meal. Such severely unrealistic gauge underscores the fact that the proportion of our population who are poor could be even significantly more than what is recorded and reported,” he noted.

Poor applicants are defined as those seeking gainful employment but “have no visible means of income or whose income falls below the official poverty threshold".

Furthermore, beneficiaries of the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s “Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program” (4Ps) are automatically eligible for the discount.

Included in the discount package are barangay clearances, National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) clearance, Philippine National Police (PNP) clearance, Department of Health (DOH) medical certificates for local employment, PSA marriage certificates and live birth certificates, transcript of Records from the state universities and colleges (SUCs), certificate of good moral character from the SUCs of the applicant, and other government-issued documentary requirements.