PSA tallies 6.2M registrants for national ID

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, November 25) — More than six million Filipinos pre-registered so far for the Philippine ID System, less than three million short of the yearend target, the Philippine Statistics Authority said.

Based on data, 6.287 million people completed the first step in securing the national ID as of November 24. The yearend target is nine million people.

READ: Pre-registration for national ID system starts Oct. 12 – PSA

Those registered were mostly heads of low-income households – a priority of the PSA as they hope to improve financial inclusion and let these families join the formal financial system. Of them, 89% currently have no bank accounts while 79.6% had a mobile number.

In terms of number of households, 3.474 million signed up. The agency added that among those registered, 53.7% are female, while 87.7% have other forms of identification like voter’s ID, senior citizen’s ID, driver’s license, PhilHealth ID, and birth certificate.

Based on PSA data, a person can complete the registration in less than 5 minutes on average in the presence of an enumerator.

The unified ID system is projected to replace and fulfill bank requirements for account opening, doing away with the current practice of presenting at least two ID cards as proof of identity.

After the pre-registration, the process will require these registrants to visit a PSA hub to encode biometrics, such as fingerprint and iris scans. Remote registration sites will be set up in the provinces, although the agency admitted that the process has been delayed due to recent typhoons.

The final leg involves the issuance of a PhilSys number and a physical ID, which will be printed by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.

PSA teams went house-to-house to collect data from families in 32 priority provinces: Ilocos Sur, La Union, Pangasinan, Cagayan, Isabela, Bataan, Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga, Tarlac, Zambales, Batangas, Cavite, Laguna, Quezon, Rizal, Albay, Camarines Sur, Masbate, Antique, Capiz, Iloilo, Negros Occidental, Bohol, Cebu, Negros Oriental, Davao De Oro, Davao del Norte, Davao del Sur, Davao Occidental, Leyte, and Tawi-Tawi.

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