THE LAND Registration Authority (LRA) has urged landowners to upgrade their titles to electronic titles.
In an advisory published on its official page last month, the agency said that although the computerization of titles, which is optional, will protect these very important documents.
It assured that the program is fully protected as the computerized titles are stored in different facilities and are not available online, preventing anyone to steal these through hacking.
If computerized, landowners will still have hard copies of the titles, to be called cTitle Duplicate, which will serve as duplicate of the electronic titles and have security features like barcodes, making it difficult to fake these.
The agency said that although the implementation of the computerized titling program, which will result in electronic titles, will result in “birth pains” and will be slow, it is necessary as titles will be protected in computers.
It said that another advantage of electronic titles, it is always hard to look for the hard copies of these documents especially because of the volumes that have been deposited to rooms and are very hard to retrieve.
This will also address, it added, the claims that some government employees have hidden or have lost some important documents, titles included, as computerizing these documents will ensure that copies are protected and cannot be taken out.
It added that computerizing these documents will incur payments of about P745 per title.
The program, it added, has been in existence for 20 years, as the contract between the government and the private contract will not push government to pay for the program.
The private contractor has about 1,000 employees to do the computerization as the company has also bought the computers and the setting up of the buildings of the Registry of Deeds as the contract for the program will be until 2026.
The agency added that some of the companies have computerized the titles of their properties like companies with big landholdings and banks.
In the 2019 Doing Business Report, the World Bank stated that LRA is one of the Philippine government agencies that have shown improvements, among them the computerization of the titles.
