CITY OF SAN FERNANDO—An average of 10 spurious documents daily are uncovered by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) regional office here, lending credence that fixers in cahoots with forgers and counterfeiters are now operating with impunity within the vicinity of the government center in this city.
This was disclosed by Edgardo G. Pare, PSA regional director, at his office here on Monday.
“They approach fakers,” Pare said about people who want to fast-track corrections on their documents. “They usually end up with more problems.”
“The fake documents used to be made in Recto in Manila, but now forgers abound even in the vicinity of this government center,” he said.
Pare said PSA security papers are being stolen and used by forgers to fake documents.
“We process an average of 5,000 documents a day during peak months like today,” he said, adding they receive a lot of complaints.
“But even if we add computers and personnel, it’s still the same, because there is a process we follow,” he said.
The peak months usually start in March when students graduate, and in April, when fresh graduates start looking for jobs, and then May and June, Pare said.
The lean months are usually from October to December when the PSA averages around 3,000 documents processed daily, he added. “We have about 170 million documents in our date base,” Pare said.
The PSA regional office has eight cashiers, while other cashiers are assigned to partners like SM City malls and Savemore, which have longer processing dates of more than a week before the documents are released, he said.
Pare also said the PSA has local government unit partners like Porac, Arayat and Lubao in Pampanga and Capas in Tarlac, where people can go to get their birth certificates and other documents.
“These are called Batch Request Systems,” he said.
Pare said people should avoid travel agencies for the processing of their documents because they charge higher rates.
The PSA regional office services mostly Pampanga, Tarlac and Bulacan residents, while Olongapo City and Cabanatuan City, which are also in Region 3, have their separate processing centers.
Pare said the proper thing to do for those seeking corrections in their documents like a misspelled name in their birth certificate is to petition the municipal-civil registrar where they were born. Then, they undergo a process, which usually takes two months.
In case of multiple entries, Pare said the BREN-Link will appear. Birth Reference Number Linking or BREN-linking is a process of linking two or more vital-event records for the same event and person. This consequently allows the issuance of only one record per person (who has multiple registrations or whose record has been annotated) after verification.
“And then it will be the municipal civil registrar who will submit the corrections to the PSA, which will be annotated in the document,” he said.
“The only things that cannot be corrected are the citizenship and the legitimation status of a person,” he said. “If you were born illegitimate, you cannot become a legitimate child, because this is specified in the public code.”