The National Statistics Office (NSO) is targeting to digitize more than 140 million of civil registry documents in an effort to improve the delivery of its services and streamline the cumbersome civil registration. The digitization, which is part of the NSO Civil Registry System Project (NSO-CRS), would take about 7 years covering 130 million worth of birth, marriage, and death certificates. NSO Registrar General, Carmelita Ericta, said they are already on the second year of converting the documents into electronic form. She said they have so far converted only around 88 percent of the birth certificates from 1952 to 1999 - a total of some 55 million records.

“The task is long and painstaking, but we’re in no hurry. We have 5 more years to finish the conversion and another five to streamline the registry system,” she said. Major Computerization ProgramAs part of its computerization project, the NSO started rolling out Census Serbilis Centers after signing up Unisys Philippines in 2000 to implement the NSO-CRS, a 12-year multiphase project that aims to improve the operation of the 80 NSO offices in the country by introducing automated data entry of civil registration.

The project would cost PhP 3.3 billion and is under a build-operate-and-transfer (BOT) scheme. According to Gene Alfred Morales, Unisys senior project manager, they are already on the third phase of the project that would see the upgrading of the 64 provincial outlets and turning them into Census Serbilis Centers. As of the third quarter of 2001, six Serbilis Centers have been deployed in Metro Manila and another 11 centers were rolled out in key cities - part of the first and second phase of the NSO-CRS. “We’ve already finished connecting these centers and our goal now is to have the remaining 64 provincial centers connected,” Morales said.  The fourth phase, targeted to begin by the end of 2003, would have the upgrading of the NSO-CRS applications and the conversion of the final batch of civil registry documents and legal decrees, such as adoption, legitimization, and annulment papers.

All of the NSO offices would be using a standard application called the Civil Registry Information System (CRIS), which could be connected to the Internet for automatic transmission of registry documents to the main office in Metro Manila. Ericta said the project would greatly clean up the inefficiencies of the NSO, both internally and externally. She noted that on an average day, they process about 12,000 civil registry applications nationwide, about 78 percent of which are related to birth certificates. The NSO-CRS would also de-clog some of their service centers, most especially their Quezon Ave. branch, which accommodates almost half of the total requests. She added that the NSO-CRS would remove fixers victimizing people who would rather avoid the long queues. Traditionally, a request for a birth, marriage, death certificate, or a certificate of no marriage (CENOMAR) would take about a week - 3 days is the fastest if done through fixers. With the NSO-CRS, an application could only take less than a day. Ericta explained that the NSO expects to attain the goal of “while-you-wait” processing after full implementation of the project. She added that all civil registry records from year 2000 to the present in Metro Manila have already been electronically encoded allowing for quick search and delivery of records. For now, the NSO would also be doing a nationwide information campaign that would educate the public on the use of the Census Serbilis Centers. “We’re more concerned about the lack of knowledge of people that such a service exists. We’ll be doing this information campaign for about a year, while the NSO communications infrastructure and management changes take effect,” Ericta said.