(MANILA BULLETIN)

The service provider tapped by Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) only managed to produce 36 million physical national identification cards (ID), roughly a third of its target of 92 million.

House Committee on Appropriations Senior Vice Chairperson, Marikina City 2nd district Rep. Stella Luz Quimbo learned this during the panel's first budget briefing Thursday, Aug.10 on the P5.768-trillion National Expenditure Program (NEP) or proposed national budget.

Quimbo asked about the status of the national ID program, to which Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) Chief Dennis Mapa said 75 million physical and digital ID have been produced. Of the figure, only 36 million were actual physical IDs.

According to BSP Senior Assistant Governor Iluminada Sicat, the contractor printed national IDs at a pace of 80,000 per day. This is way below the expected 126,000 per day production.

Quimbo told the PSA and BSP to submit to the panel their official report on the Philsys or national ID program.

When Quimbo asked the reason for the slow pace of production, Sicat replied, "Based on the input provided to me the yearly target deliverables were not achieve due to among other factors such as operational challenges, meaning insufficient data flow, design changes, which led to the non-fulfillment as well as delay of the personalization and production of the Philsys ID cards.”

But Sicat assured the congressmen that the BSP was already "studying our legal operational options with regards to our current service provider".

For his part, Mapa noted that there was a design change on the national ID that contributed to the delay.

“For example the information in the QR code, there were additional information so the QR code became bigger and it would take some time to print it...the original target of the BSP based on the discussion with PSA in 2020 is about 126,000 cards per days, so we made adjustment in the QR code and it slowed down at 80,000 per day," he explained.