A CONGRESSMAN on Wednesday asked the administration to set a deadline and terminate the contract for national ID cards if the supplier fails to meet the target date.
Northern Samar Rep. Paul R. Daza said President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. should order a contract review that would be made public as well as look for a new head of the Philippine Statistics Authority, the lead implementing agency for the national ID program that started Oct. 2020.
“What’s important is that the President and National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) Secretary Arsenio M. Balisacan come up with a deadline, let’s say next month, and if they are not able to meet that deadline, then the contracts should probably be terminated,” Mr. Daza, said in an interview with ABS-CBN News Channel.
“If it is really delayed despite having funding, then maybe the best thing to do is to terminate the contract.”
Given the historical delays, the government would probably not meet the target of 92 million national ID cards delivered by June next year, he added.
Mr. Daza also suggested that the government should consider issuing digital IDs instead.
“I think the best thing they (the government) can do is to consider digital ID,” he said. “The trend all over the world is to have digital IDs, so that should have been done, because there’s about 80 million Filipinos with phones, and most have smartphones.”
He said printed IDs would be optional.
During the House deliberations for NEDA’s 2023 budget, Mr. Daza questioned why only P6.8 billion out of the P28.4 billion fund for the Philippine Identification System (PhilSys) or the National ID project had been used. — Kyanna Angela Bulan