MANILA, Philippines – The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), during the Senate’s final hearing on Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGO), said it was looking into around 50,000 certificates due to alleged fraud.
During the inquiry on Tuesday, November 26, Assistant National Statistician Marizza Grande said based on their fact-finding investigation, they found nearly 50,000 suspected fraudulent cases of birth certificates and relayed them to their field offices for further investigation.
“And this is ongoing…. right now. So we will be updating the committee once we have these reports coming from our PSA field offices,” Grande said.
The PSA official said that as of October, they have already blocked 100,720 birth certificates and civil registry documents. Of this number, 1,627 were birth certificates obtained by foreigners, while 1,464 cases were endorsed for the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) for the filing of petition for cancellation.
“So, ‘yong isa na case nga po dito na na-file na namin with OSG ito ‘yong cancellation ng birth certificate [ni] former mayor Alice Guo (So one of the cases we filed with the OSG was the cancellation case against former mayor Alice Guo’s birth certificate). So that’s one of the immediate actions that we did,” Grande said.
The issue of fraudulent birth certificates was among the results of the legislative probes into illegal POGOs after lawmakers found out that dismissed mayor Alice Guo allegedly obtained hers illegally.
PSA moved to cancel Guo’s document after it found that her only supporting document for her late registration of birth was a “negative certificate” from the National Statistics Office (NSO), or a proof that there she has no birth certificate in any of the government’s records.
What was irregular in Guo’s case was her late birth certificate was issued even before she secured the said supporting document. In July, the OSG filed a petition in a Tarlac court to cancel Guo’s certificate. If the court approves the OSG petition, Guo will lose her Filipino citizenship.
The cancellation of a person’s birth certificate is a long process and requires court proceedings. So even though the PSA has already endorsed thousands of cases for cancellation, it will take time for the OSG and the court to act on these. Besides, courts also handle thousands of other cases, apart from cancellation cases like in the Guo petition.
“Considering the huge number of these cases, exceeding 1,500 in one civil registry office alone, we have recommended to congress the enactment of a law that would authorize administrative cancellation of such birth certificates in lieu of a tedious and expensive judicial process,” Solicitor General Menardo Guevarra told reporters.
However, safeguards should be in place if the government will be granted the administrative power to cancel a person’s birth certificate. There should be clear rules and grounds, and it should be ensured that this mandate would not be abused if ever.
Meanwhile, the PSA said it is currently sharing its data with the Department of Foreign Affairs, National Bureau of Investigation, and the Bureau of Immigration for the blocking of birth certificates. Grande said they report to these agencies the names of foreigners with fraudulent records.
“So we are currently pushing for the amendment of Act 3753 (civil registration law of the Philippines). This is the law to establish a civil register. There’s really need to amend it. It’s a 1930 law. There have been a lot of changes and several laws pertaining to civil registration…. So there’s a digitization project and we hope that the government would support the funding for that,” Grande added. – Rappler.com
