The province of Benguet is being considered as one of the pilot areas for the testing of the P30 billion-worth Philippine Identification System.
Philippine Statistics Authority Asec. and Deputy National Statistician Lourdinesdela Cruz said Benguet would be a good testing site due to the large population of indigenous peoples in the province.
“We are reconsidering Benguet because we have a lot of indigenous peoples here and it is a very good example for pilot test,” said dela Cruz, the focal person for the PhilSys project.
Dela Cruz, the guest speaker during the 30th National Statistics Month program in the province, said there is the PhilSys is currently having pilot test in Manila starting with registration of individuals.
He said they are eyeing to come up to the province in the first quarter of the year.
The pilot teststarted in September 2019 and will endJune 2020. DSWD beneficiaries, employees of PSA, and government employees involved in the PhilSys project are part of the pilot test.
“Our objective is for us to see how long it takes for an individual to register in filling up forms, how to improve the form, and more importantly how we see to it that the security of the data being gathered is protected,” he said.
After gathering the information, the next step would be to reconfigure the system to fit the system to the specific individual, he said.
The focal person for PhilSys said they are also considering putting up special lanes for individuals such as farmers whose fingerprints are difficult to be read by the system.
“As much as possible,we would like to prioritize them or give them a special lane so as not to hold up the line for other registrants,” he said.
Dela Cruz said the multi-billion ID system will be for free for every Filipino citizen.
He said no IDs will be released this year, but those who underwent pilot testfor their registration would be the first to be given IDs by third quarter of 2020. – Ofelia C. Empian
