By Macon Ramos-Araneta
Senator Raffy Tulfo has slammed the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) over its take over from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) the printing of the national identification cards with a huge P28 billion contract.
In an earlier hearing of the Senate Committee on Finance, Tulfo asked why the BSP, which is tasked to print money, interfered with the printing of IDs.
Worse, Tulfo noted that after the PSA got the project from BSP, the contract was passed on to AllCard, Inc.
This was despite the fact that the AllCard had previous problems with various government agencies, including delays in contract implementation.
Since the National ID law was passed in 2018, only 36 million physical national ID cards have been printed, re resenting roughly one-third of the government target of 92 million.
“Now, AllCard was delayed anew in the implementation of its contract
with the BSP. But delay was not the only problem of All Card as it also committed a huge blunder,” Tulfo said.
According to the senator, the BSP failed to correctly design the QR code for the national ID cards since the design was too small and not enough to store important information.
As a result of this, the BSP may need to destroy millions of cards that have been initially printed to be replaced by a new design.
Tulfo also questioned why the BSP tapped an Australian company to print the P1,000-bills. He said this only means that Philippine money is made and imported from Australia.
According to Tulfo, he will file a resolution to investigate these issues against the BSP and the AllCard.