Unregistered Pinoys

These are some of the travails of the poor in this country:

A woman who has been working in the informal sector in Manila for nearly her entire adult life returned to her hometown in the Visayas last month, for the first time in over a decade.

The reason: she needed a birth certificate for Social Security System (SSS) and state health insurance coverage.

It was going to be a late birth registration; she was not born in a hospital or even delivered by a midwife, but simply by a folk therapist or manghihilot, who died years ago. Fortunately, the hilot recorded the delivery in a hospital that remains in operation.

The woman’s siblings, husband and children were born and bred in their hometown, and they still live there. But she was told that they could not obtain her birth certificate on her behalf; her personal presence was needed.

Various circumstances including the COVID lockdowns had kept the woman from visiting her family for years. A mountain of pasalubong she had accumulated each year overflowed in her small room. And so, even if she knew the homecoming trip was going to be arduous, she was glad for the opportunity to finally bring at least some of the stuff to her loved ones.

The huge pile of pasalubong made her decline her employer’s offer of a plane ticket; cargo cost of her pasalubong would have been more expensive than her airfare.

Instead she booked a van for “door-to-door” service. This is an informal transport service in which passengers are picked up at their homes and delivered close to or right at the doorsteps of their destinations, with liberal rules on baggage.

The trip, with several pit stops plus one ro-ro ride, normally takes a day and a half. But it stretched for nearly two days because they had to wait for a passenger in Bulacan.

She was charged a base fare of P2,800 and another P3,000 for her cargo.

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Back in her birthplace, the woman found out that she had many townmates without a birth certificate, so local officials already knew how to deal with her predicament. She was advised to get statements from known long-time residents who could attest that she was born there, delivered by the hilot.

Gathering the statements took about a week.

She also got a certification from the hospital where the hilot had registered babies she had delivered. With all these documents, the woman went to the local civil registry, where she was told that she would have to wait six months for the birth certificate, to be issued by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).

The woman turned to humor to deal with her frustration, laughing at jokes that after raising three children, she had finally become a citizen officially recognized by the state. Then she packed her bags and returned to Manila, paying another P2,700 for door-to-door transport.

This return trip on a different van took nearly as long as the one going out of Manila, because they again had to wait for a passenger picked up along the way to put together the required fare. The trip coincided with heavy rains in the Visayas, and the van roof leaked. The woman got drenched and needed a change of clothes when the sky cleared up.

I wonder how long it took for former Bamban mayor Alice Guo to obtain her Philippine birth certificate through late registration. Probably within a day, if she paid the P300,000 that crooks in the PSA reportedly collected for each fast-tracked late registration.

Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian had said the fake birth certificates were usually sold in a package with other fake IDs such as passports and driver’s licenses.

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Incidentally, what ever happened to those crooks at the civil registrar’s office in the Davao del Sur town of Sta. Cruz? The National Bureau of Investigation had said that between 2016 and 2023, the gang issued at least 1,576 fake certificates mainly to Chinese nationals, through late registration. Long-time Sta. Cruz civil registrar Mario Tizon was sacked amid the NBI probe.

And also, all along I thought the national ID is designed to be the primary valid ID for transacting with government agencies such as the SSS, Philippine Health Insurance Corp. and Home Development Mutual Fund or Pag-IBIG as well as private banks.

The woman obtained her national ID in 2024, but she was told that SSS and PhilHealth require a birth certificate together with the national ID. And the birth certificate must be one issued by the PSA rather than just a city or municipal government.

What ever happened to the national identification system?

According to the PSA website, over 90.5 million Filipinos had registered for the Philippine Identification System or PhilSys as of early this year, with 55 million physical ID cards delivered so far.

That leaves over 20 million Filipinos still without a national ID, although this figure would include young children.

For the woman, her national ID has not worked as a prime valid ID.

There are many others like her, at past age 40 still with no official birth record, and unable to avail themselves of many government services.