REGISTRATION will soon go online as the 20th City Council passed the ordinance digitalizing the local civil registry (LCR) on Thursday, Dec. 12.
The ordinance is entitled “An ordinance for the digitalization of the local civil registry of Davao City through the Civil Registration Information System (CRIS) Online and appropriate funds for its implementation.”
As stated in the ordinance, the Local Civil Registrar will establish an online registry system for Davaoeños and the public in general to secure relevant documents.
Councilor Bonz Andre Militar, committee chair of information technology, said the development provides an “efficient and expeditious” manner of retrieving copies as the requesting party need not visit the LCR physically.
“Convenience and accessibility at their fingertips is what we intend to accomplish in upgrading our LCR system,” the councilor stressed.
The system will be developed by the city Information Technology Center and will be accessible to the public through an application or website.
Partner agencies will be provided with a dedicated system for the submission of the civil registry documents for registration. The system will also interconnect with other government agencies such as the Philippine Statistics Authority, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Philippine Regulation Commission, among others.
For the development of the system, the city government will provide an initial funding of P5 million through its annual budget allocated for the LCR, or from any of its supplemental budget.
This will fund the equipment needed to develop the project entailing a one-time expense such as system development, file server, computers, laptops, scanners and other peripherals, computer tables, queuing system hardware, EDP section office renovation, printers, cloud service, direct internet access, and additional manpower.
All recurring annual expenses for its maintenance are charged to the annual budget of the Office of the LCR.
The LCR will be charging standard fees for such certified copies and certifications of civil registry documents to the requesting party.
On data privacy concerns, all system users/ partner institutions are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the LCR about any sensitive information/personal data received. Breach of the NDA shall be subject to the Data Privacy Ordinance of the city.
Atty. Leo Anthony Braceros, the city civil registrar, said they needed to upgrade a system “to make it easy for fellow Davaoeños to gain access.”
In his privilege speech, Militar said the need to upgrade was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic where people had to wait for at least a week to secure documents from the LCR,
“Davaoeños can create an account online which they can access wherever they are in the globe. As soon as this is created, the user will be able to request documents online and have them delivered without the need of queuing at our LCR Office,” the councilor added.
File Photo by Bing Gonzales
