DAVAO CITY – Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) Davao Region Director Pepito Amoyen appealed for the cooperation of residents in the ongoing house-to-house pre-registration for the Philippine Identification System (PhilSys).
Enumerators from the PSA have started interviewing heads of families in the region on basic data that will be integrated using the systems integrator prior to its final printing.
“I am asking for your full cooperation in answering the enumerators about your demographic data for encoding,” Amoyen told residents in an interview with GMA-Davao on Tuesday.
The pre-registration is being done to fast track the actual registration process on November.
PSA is targeting to complete the PhilSys registration for low income families by December this year.
“The residents’ cooperation is needed so we can beat the November target to complete the registration process,” Amoyen said.
Amoyen made the call after receiving reports that some residents are hesitant to provide basic information about their identities for fear of being profiled.
He said PSA-Davao is targeting to interview some 35-37 heads of families daily for the PhilSys pre-registration.
Based on the primer of PhilSys Act of 2018, Form No. 1 contains basic information about the ID holder.
Mary Desorio , a resident, said she is supporting PhilSys since it aims to formalize each Filipino’s identity.
“This policy is good because every Filipino and resident alien who are in the country are identified. It is a way of legitimizing our identity,” she said in the vernacular.
Another resident, Cheryl Matugina, said she approves of Philsys because it seeks to provide a central identification platform which is highly needed in addressing societal issues.
In case of criminal acts, she said persons could be easily tracked down.
Meanwhile, during this time of the Covid-19 pandemic, a national ID is very important especially on contact tracing, according to Engineering student Henry Galile.
Had it been implemented earlier, he said authorities would have been relieved of the hardship in tracing people with close contacts to Covid-19 positive patients.
“It could have been easier to trace the contacts of Covid-19 positives since the basic information of each ID holder is stored in one system,” he said in the vernacular. (PNA)
