Around 18 million pieces of National Identification cards have been delivered while one million were not delivered by mail carriers since January, the Philippine Postal Corporation said on Friday.

Postmaster General Norman Fulgencio told reporters that delivery of the National ID is done every day, even on weekends.

Fulgencio explained that around one million deliveries were unsuccessful as the recipients of the IDs were not present to personally claim it.

Three delivery attempts are made and if the ID is still not received, it is returned to the Philippine Statistics Authority which produces the ID and process applications for such, he added.

Fulgencio said PhilPost originally did not keep track of unsuccessful deliveries in the past, but has started to add such data in their delivery reports.

"The data that we often provide is the successful deliveries, but we don't often the unsuccessful deliveries. This time around, we will also include the number of attempts that we did to deliver the ID," Fulgencio said.

The Postmaster General said the high number of failed deliveries stemmed from recipients transferring residence, especially for work which is especially in the case of those living in the provinces.

The PSA on Monday reported more than 23 million National IDs for delivery as of 28 October. It aims to deliver 50 million physical and digital National IDs before the end of the year.