Birth certificates while you wait

It used to be that requesting a copy of your birth certificate could be almost as painful as childbirth itself. But thanks to technology, the National Statistics Office (NSO) can process your request while you wait, albeit for a little extra cost.

For a fee of P110, the NSO can issue a birth certificate that has been converted from paper into digital format from any of its six computerized Census Serbilis Centers in Metro Manila and 12 outlets in the provinces. The old rate was P60, but the additional P50 for the modernization buys the public the convenience of not having to line up and wait long hours or, in the case of those from the provinces, traveling to Manila to get their papers.

The modernization at NSO has also cut the time needed to process civil registry documents from five to seven working days to within a day.

As long as the birth records have already been included in the new NSO Civil Registry System (CRS) database, such documents requested in the morning can be released in the afternoon. On the other hand, requests submitted in the afternoon will be realized in the morning of the following day.

As of Aug. 19, the NSO has already converted birth records from 1952 to 1986 and 1992 to 1999, which represent some 55.7 million births in the Philippines. NSO Administrator and Civil Registrar-General Carmelita Ericta says the converted birth records represent two-thirds of the population and 88 percent of the total birth certificates in the agency’s physical archives.

The NSO aims to complete the digital conversion of birth records all the way back to 1945, including endorsements and foreign births, by November this year. But birth records during the pre-war years will likely be with the national archives, says Ericta. She notes that the civil registration system was created in 1898 and prior to that, records of civil documents were done in churches.

"The NSO has decided to prioritize the conversion of birth documents since requests for copies of birth certificates are the most in demand from the agency," says Ericta, noting that the NSO receives some 12,000 applications daily for copies of civil registry documents, 78 percent of them for birth certificates.

There are currently over 120 million documents, on paper or microfilm, lodged in NSO’s physical archives that will undergo the arduous conversion process under the NSO-CRS project. The digital conversion of marriage records is targeted to start within the year.

In the meantime, requests for unconverted civil registry documents such as marriage and death certificates, adoption, legitimization or annulment papers, will still be subject to manual retrieval and processing and will go through the regular turnaround time before they are released.

Civil Registry System

With three babies born in the country every minute, the NSO urgently needs a computerized system to keep pace with the ever-increasing volume of civil registry documents in its care. With the CRS, not only can the agency modernize its filing system, it can finally solve its crowd control management problem as well as improve its computing capability.

The NSO-CRS project is a 12-year, multi-phase computerization project in partnership with Unisys Phils. Inc., a global systems integration company. Using imaging technology, the project is designed to collect, store and manage civil registry documents, and the specimen signatures of all the city and municipal registrars, including all CRS authorized signatories.

The P3.3-billion NSO-CRS is being carried out under a build-operate-transfer (BOT) scheme.

Converted civil registry documents are those that have undergone the process of scanning, indexing and transformation into digital format through imaging technology. Once loaded in the database, document retrieval is made faster and more efficient, which emboldened the NSO to promise "while-you-wait" processing.

Ericta adds that the agency expects to attain the "while-you-wait" goal only when the rollout of all Census Serbilis Centers in strategic locations nationwide and the backfile conversion of civil registry and related documents are completed.

The NSO-CRS project also aims to minimize the falsification and fabrication of civil registry papers by adopting WORM (write-once-ready-many) technology as a security measure to eliminate tampering once the original document is scanned. The converted copies are printed on special security CRS paper featuring an authorized electronic signature.

Ericta says they don’t touch the original copies of civil registry documents to preserve their integrity. She says all documents are scanned as they are, including possible original errors in data entry. "There are forums to petition for correction or changes in civil registry documents under Republic Act 9048 or by going to court," says Ericta.

Meanwhile, the NSO, every 10th of the month, waits to get copies of new documents from the provincial civil registries. Ericta says they want to encourage the use of scanners in the provincial registries so they can update the NSO’s electronic database immediately.

Unisys was awarded the CRS project in December 1999 and Malacañang approved it in March 2000. The NSO handed Unisys the "notice to proceed" on April 5, 2000, and two months later, the program was officially launched in Malacañang.

Serbilis

The NSO-CRS project is on track with the establishment of the Census Serbilis Centers in Metro Manila and in some provinces within the allotted 34 months for Phases I and II. There are Serbilis Centers on East Avenue in Quezon City; Roxas Boulevard in Pasay City; and in the city government offices of Caloocan, Makati, Muntinlupa and Pasig. In the provinces, there are Serbilis Centers in the cities of Baguio, Legazpi, Tuguegarao, Cebu, Iloilo, Tacloban, Butuan, Davao, Cagayan de Oro and Zamboanga. There are two centers in San Fernando, Pampanga. Serbilis centers in Cotabato and Lipa will open soon.

The Serbilis centers are linked by a wide area network and are online to provide the full range of CRS services. People can request their civil registry documents as many times as they want, Ericta says. Transacting in the air-conditioned Serbilis Centers only involves four steps: application, verification, payment and releasing.

During Phase III, the project proponents should put up 64 more provincial outlets, for a total of 78 Serbilis Centers in the regions. This number should make the "request-anywhere" feature of the project a reality. Serbilis centers in local government offices are open not just to their constituents but to people outside their localities, Ericta says.

Phase IV should see the upgrading of the project’s IT resources as well as the conversion of court decrees and legal instruments and the final batch of civil registry documents into digital format.

Meanwhile, the public can also log on to http://www.e-census.com.ph to request for copies of civil registry documents and pay the corresponding service fee in any Metrobank branch. Upon payment of P275 for first copy or P175 for subsequent copies, the NSO will facilitate the request and mail the documents to the requesting party. Another alternative is to call the NSO hotline (737-1111) to arrange for a copy of one’s civil registry record.