The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said it will come up with a digital version of the identification (ID) card that is mobile phone-friendly and will be usable by the end of the year following the orders of President Marcos Jr. for the agency to help speed up the distribution of the ID cards.
The President in his official Facebook account said he has also instructed the DICT to assist the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) with biometric collection to speed up the national ID registration process during the sectoral meeting in Malacanang on Tuesday.
DICT Secretary Ivan Uy, in a briefing yesterday, said the President has “expressed his impatience” with the delay in distribution of the physical national ID “because a lot of things needed to be done and it’s all dependent on the deployment of a national ID.”
The President also ordered the PSA last year to ensure the physical copy of the IDs is distributed by 2023. A temporary black and white copy of the ID that bears a QR code was initially issued to registered Filipinos.
Uy said DICT has been receiving numerous complaints about the delay in the delivery of their ID cards.
He said that upon the directive of Marcos, the DICT has started to develop the digital ID which would be incorporated in the e-government (e-Gov) application to make it easier to access especially when transacting with government agencies and offices or availing of government services.
“We will the digital ID in e-Gov app so that when you transact using your digital ID credentials on that single eGov app, you no longer need to sign in with each agency of government because the data from the ID is already there,” Uy explained.
Uy said DICT has started coordination with the PSA to access the data of some 80 million Filipinos that they collected through the National ID registration which will then be made available to the digital ID.
He said the DICT plans to make available at least a “significant portion” of digital national IDs before 2023 ends.
“We’re doing this in parallel because the public has grown impatient and they don’t want to wait forever for that physical ID…By end of the year, we would have deployed significantly the digital ID. In a few months, we will do our best to deploy that digital ID system),” he added.
Uy said the PSA was officially tasked to capture the biometrics, facial recognition, and personal information of Filipinos and keep it in a database.
He said DICT would only access the database to make it the digital version and ensure that it is accessible and usable in transactions with government agencies, but the storage of information would remain with PSA.
He also assured that the digital version would have enough safety features to ensure safety and security of everyone’s personal information.
According to the PSA, more than 43 million PhilIDs were dispatched as of August.
