I THINK that so far, it is only the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) that is successfully operating a purely online electronic commerce platform in the Philippines to “sell” a physical product in the form of paper documents.
Right now, anyone can order birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates and Certificates of No Marriage Records (CENOMAR) from the PSA, without the need for a personal appearance.
Perhaps wanting to provide the next best thing, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA),
Philippine National Police (PNP) and Land Transportation Office (LTO) are offering online applications, but they would still require personal appearances.
Apparently, some Local Government Units (LGUs) are offering the purely online issuance of products in the form of paper documents, but it is difficult to find out which of them are doing so, and there appears to be no national standards that govern the conduct of these processes.
Ideally, any citizen of any LGU should be able to “order” a physical product that could come in paper form, usually in the form of a document. For example, these could be business permits, health certificates and police clearances.
When President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. issued the instructions to “digitalize” the government, I think what he meant was to make government services available online, meaning over the internet, and not over the Local Area Networks (LANs) of the National Government Agencies (NGAs) and LGUs.
I think what he meant was to transfer all government transactions online, and make them “digital”, without any more need for manual transactions, meaning also that there will be no more need for face-to-face transactions or physical appearances.
For all intents and purposes, facial recognition, voice recognition and corneal recognition technologies could already take the place of physical appearances. And if is not too much to ask, those NGAs and LGUs that are still skeptical could even require gait recognition.
But even without using advanced biometric and algorithmic solutions, those who are still doubting could ask multiple security questions and several means of multifactor authentication. “Ease of doing business” is a law that we should not ignore.
Whether we see the direct correlation between the law and the use of digital technologies, the end goal is the same, and that is to make it easier for our citizens to do business with our NGAs and LGUs.
Believe it or not, electronic commerce could not only save money for our citizens, it could also save them the efforts of commuting just to make the unnecessary personal appearances./PN
