The group is composed of heads from the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), the National Statistics Office (NSO), the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS), the Social Security System (SSS), Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) and Pag-IBIG Fund.
The UMID card would also feature holographic or ultraviolet prints to prevent illegal duplication of the card.
However, the group specified that the use of a new card design would not replace the same designs of cards by the issuing government agencies, only that upcoming cards should have magnetic strips or electronic chips.
Likewise, the CRN system, recently developed by the NSO, would not be the only numbers used by the card-issuing agencies but would be used as a common number issued to one person with separate cards.
Thus, the storage of personal and biometric data would be left to the issuing agencies. Only the CRN would be made accessible to all agencies, which would ensure that personal data is maintained by each agency.
The UMID project is currently being pilot tested at the NSO, NEDA and PhilHealth offices, which would be finished by December this year.
The pilot agencies would be outfitted with biometric capture stations and would receive a total of 2,000 cards.
The UMID is expected to be completed by the end of 2007.
The UMID project was supposed to have 200 million pesos from the e-Government Fund last year but was pulled out by the DBM, though the Spanish government provided a 100,000-euro (6.8 million pesos) grant for the pilot test.
The UMID project, created under Executive Order 420, aims to streamline the issuance of IDs to Filipinos as well as to improve the delivery of government services.
However, critics of the project argued that the UMID might breach privacy issues and could be used by the government to monitor people's movements.
Last April, the Supreme Court junked a case filed by citizen's groups Kilusang Mayo Uno and Bayan Muna, two critics of the UMID project.
Autor/Author: Alexander Villafania
Quelle/Source: INQ7, 30.05.2006
