Over the course of the pandemic, the LTO has sought to make transactions with its agency easier, more efficient, and most importantly, safer in light of the risks brought about by COVID-19. While many of these programs have been outlined much earlier, the social distancing protocols in place have hastened their implementation.

It’s why it now has improvements like the Land Transportation Management System (LTMS), sometimes called the LTO Portal. This new site allows visitors to do some parts of their transactions online, and minimize processing done at LTO’s offices. It also allows them to see certain issues tied to the vehicles and licenses in their name.

The idea behind this was to create a unified system where a registered user’s license, vehicles, and personal details are gathered together, making it easier for the LTO to find the owner of a vehicle, and possibly even issue tickets through the various no contact apprehension programs.

It also makes it easier for related operations like driving schools, medical clinics, and private motor vehicle inspection centers (PMVIC) to send data directly to the LTO. By putting it online, it minimizes paper usage as well as tampering of any results. These are all aimed to reduce red tape, fixers, and sometimes even cheating in the tests.

While it all seems well and good on paper and in press releases, there are challenges in its actual implementation. There seems to be a need for some personnel to be acquainted with the new system.

There are comments from concerned citizens who have tried the online transaction system but when they went to the LTO office with their documents, they were advised to have their vehicles undergo the old emission test.

Another issue is with the LTO Portal itself. Aside from the challenge of internet connection in this part of the world, readers have reported that their passwords were not recognized months after they did the first transaction.

Requesting for a new password through the system was frustrating as the link was emailed a day later, clearly way past the one-hour window to change the password or complete a transaction online. Requesting again for a new password involved the same process with the link being sent days later.

Although there is still much to be done to make the online transaction for vehicle registration efficient, we believe that it is not an impossible task. The LTO had faced more challenging situations in the past and had responded successfully with good solutions.

One of these situations was how it managed to reduce the seemingly insurmountable new plate backlog by acquiring its own machines and printing the plates themselves. The plate backlog was at 5.2 million pairs and as of August 2021, the LTO had already produced 3,940,705 pairs. The annual registration stickers have also been eliminated in favor of a one-time sticker with all the pertinent vehicle data.

With LTO proving in the past that it could overcome these challenges, it is not impossible for these new registration-related issues to be addressed appropriately as well.