President Joseph Estrada was the guest of honor in the launching of the Civil Registration System Information Technology Project (CRS-ITP) held in Malacaņang yesterday afternoon. CRS-ITP is an undertaking of the National Statistics Office (NSO), in partnership with Unisys, Philippines. It is targeted at improving the issuance of copies of certifications of birth, death, marriage and other similar documents. Other guests during the project launching include, among others, Executive Secretary Ronaldo Zamora and Trade and Industry Secretary Mar Roxas II.

Estrada commended the NSO for its efforts to increase efficiency in Philippine's bureaucracy for better government performance. The project, he added, will "address the perennial problem on storage and retrieval of records" and will help "eradicate fixers who take advantage of co-Filipinos." Likewise, he also congratulated the NSO as well as its mother agency, the National Economic and Development Authority, and Unisys, Philippines for forging into a partnership that will help promote "an environment conducive to foreign investments."

Meanwhile, NSO Administrator Tomas Africa, in his welcome remarks, informed those present that upon full implementation of the project, clients will be able to obtain their certificates within 30 minutes in the Metro Manila and within two hours at the regional and provincial outlets allowing greater ease and convenience. Apart from these, the CRS-ITP will also provide inherent security features that will further minimize fraud and fabrication of civil registry documents.

A central facility will be established at the NSO, Manila, and 84 CRS outlets nationwide. The project will digitize over 110 million documents currently being held by the NSO in its Archives. Midway through the project, conversion of all civil registry documents coming from the local civil registry offices will commence to update the database and to maintain an almost complete record of all civil registry documents. Likewise, the project will establish a wide area network infrastructure to support the communication requirements of all other outlets nationwide.

The CRS-ITP will be developed and maintained by Unisys, Philippines, the project proponent selected through the BOT bidding process. The computerization project is estimated to cost PhP 2.12 billion but it will be at no cost to the government.

The project has begun in the first semester of year 2000 and by mid-2001, the central facility and 5 Metro Manila outlets will already be open for transactions. Its full implementation, in outlets in other NSO regional and provincial offices nationwide, is expected to be complete in the next 36 months.