IN “2 Valid IDs,” an entry in this year’s 22nd Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, actress Pokwang plays Sylvia, a poor farmer who cannot claim a relative’s remittance for her husband’s medical treatment because she does not have the two valid identification documents the money center demands of her. She has never needed one before. Desperate and running out of time, she turns to a fixer, and what follows is less a story about paperwork than about what a country does to its poorest citizens when it makes proof of identity a privilege rather than a right (https://www.cinemalaya.org/2-valid-ids/).
The film’s own promotional material makes the irony explicit — it is only in the Philippines, it says, that one is asked to produce two valid IDs just to get another one. That single line ought to embarrass every official who had a hand in the national identification system that was supposed to make Sylvia’s predicament a thing of the past.
Failed national ID system
That system, the Philippine Identification System, or PhilSys, was signed into law by then-president Rodrigo Duterte in August 2018 as Republic Act 11055, precisely to end the absurdity of Filipinos juggling multiple documents just to transact with government and businesses. Eight years later, it is fair to ask whether PhilSys solved the problem it was built for, or simply became a bigger version of it.
A Commission on Audit finding cited in a 2023 Senate resolution showed that by the end of 2021, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) had delivered only around 27.3 million pre-personalized ID cards — about 76 percent of the 36 million required for that year alone, and a fraction of the 116 million cards the BSP was contracted to produce between 2021 and 2023. Then-senator Aquilino Pimentel III, in filing that resolution, noted reports that some printed cards had already become unreadable within three months of release, and asked whether the delay was ordinary bureaucratic inertia or a sign of something worse. By mid-2024, reporting put actual distribution at only 51.6 million cards against tens of millions more already registered — leaving a shortfall in the tens of millions and pushing the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) to fall back on digital IDs, which then drew their own wave of complaints. Cards that did arrive were flagged for inaccurate data and, in practice, refused by banks and other institutions that were supposed to treat the PhilID as sufficient on its own (https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1764613/probe-of-delayed-philsys-ids-pushed).
AllCard Inc., the contractor engaged for the supply, delivery, installation and commissioning of card-production equipment, was eventually terminated by the BSP after reportedly failing to deliver on that contract for three years, a termination the company has contested. That breakdown was serious enough that the citizen watchdog group Crimes and Corruption Watch International filed a graft complaint with the Office of the Ombudsman against BSP officials — including a sitting and a former governor — the PSA chief and AllCard’s board. Whatever the merits of that particular complaint, its existence is itself a data point — people entrusted with a multibillion-peso national infrastructure project are now the subject of a graft case before the Ombudsman, over a program that has yet to finish registering the entire population it was designed to serve.
The national ID fiasco follows a corrupt-ridden project pattern — a law with a good purpose to start with, a procurement process that runs into yearslong delays, a contractor that cannot deliver, an audit that flags the shortfall and, so far, no established accountability from the government officials involved. Sylvia’s fixer, in the end, is not so different from the workaround every Filipino has had to invent because the government’s own solution to the two-ID problem could not be trusted to work on time, or at all.
NBI should investigate
Which brings us to the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI). It has just revived its inquiry into the 2019 Southeast Asian Games — the P50-million cauldron, the roughly P10 billion in alleged congressional insertions, the unliquidated funds tied to the Philippine Southeast Asian Games Organizing Committee — seven years after the event took place, issuing subpoenas to former organizing officials this month.
If the bureau can reach back seven years to question a sports event’s finances, it can certainly reach back to a national identification program that has been bleeding public funds, missing its own delivery targets and drawing graft complaints in plain sight since 2018. The PhilSys mess is not ancient history; it is a live, ongoing failure that is still denying Filipinos like Sylvia the one document the law promised would finally be enough.
The NBI does not need an anniversary or a controversy involving a senator to justify looking into it. It needs only to ask the same question it is asking of the SEA Games organizers. Where did the money go? Who is/are accountable for the delay?
Filipinos who have stood in line, been turned away for lacking “two valid IDs,” and watched billions of pesos disappear into a program still unfinished deserve nothing less.
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