Fake birth certificates mess

Quickly cracking down on the fake birth certificate racketeers exploiting the easy process of late birth registrations is, of course, the first order of business.

Indeed, the discovery by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) last week of 1,200 foreigners, believed to be Chinese nationals, obtaining birth certificates in the Davao del Sur town of Sta. Cruz since 2016 is scandalous enough to require prompt action.

As it is, the NBI’s findings expectedly raised a furor all around, prompting demands that authorities dig deeper into the mess involving the faking of the foundational document that establishes Filipino identity.

Getting to the bottom of the birth certificate mess, however, will take time and require the closely coordinated efforts of various relevant agencies.

The Bureau of Immigration (BI), for example, says it has to coordinate with the NBI, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), and even the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) before it can get down to the business of investigating the Sta. Cruz-issued fake birth certificates.

Yet, the BI and the other relevant agencies could expedite their individual probes by looking for the records they have on Chinese nationals who arrived in 2015 and afterwards.

Particularly so since initial NBI findings showed that at least 102 cases of suspicious late birth registrations in Sta. Cruz town were recorded in 2018, 2019 and 2021.

By scrutinizing only their records from 2015 onwards, the authorities should be able to quickly validate their suspicions if a number of Chinese nationals employed by Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) had taken advantage of the late birth registration process to obtain Filipino identities, which is really the focus of the current probes.

Focusing only on the suggested time frame, however, might prejudice the investigations of some suspicious cases involving late birth registrations prior to 2015 like the notorious case of Bamban Mayor Alice L. Guo.

But the difficulties involved in closely scrutinizing decades of records is no easy task, gets us nowhere in the short term, and might even lead to anti-Chinese witch hunts.

Focusing instead on records from 2015 might achieve faster results in directly addressing suspicions that fake birth certificates benefited Chinese nationals who recently arrived in the country, the cause of the present peace and order problems as well as national security anxieties.

Significantly, those dates closely coincide with the years POGOs were at their peak and where authorities have voluminous records about recently arrived Chinese nationals.

Both the BI and the Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE), for instance, have in their possession such records as DoLE’s Alien Employment Permits (AEP) and BI’s Special Working Permits (SWP), permits which significantly spiked more than 100 percent mere months after former President Rodrigo Duterte assumed office.

DoLE, in fact, even has statistics showing where Chinese nationals were employed in those years.

In 2015-2018, for example, a study showed that 53.3 percent of issued AEPs were given to Chinese nationals in the following industries: administrative and support services (e.g. POGOs), 35.9 percent; manufacturing, 24 percent; arts and recreation, 17.5 percent; and information and communications technology, 10.6 percent.

Cross-checking those AEPs with current PSA and DFA data should enable authorities to quickly trace the present whereabouts of the Chinese nationals after the pandemic caused the near-collapse of POGOs — thereby allowing quick assessments if the late birth registration process had been abused or not.

Meantime, the involvement of corrupt government functionaries in the fake birth certificate racket is no more than just another instance of our corrupt bureaucrats profiting from illegal activities.

There is practically nothing surprising in the Senate’s planned probe into reports that the falsified birth certificates were obtained from Sta. Cruz town’s civil registrar for an average fee of P300,000 each.

In fact, still fresh in our memories are the cases of two BI deputy commissioners who allegedly received hefty bribes in exchange for the release of some 1,200 Chinese nationals arrested inside the Clark Freeport Zone in 2016 and the reported “quick” processing in Taguig City of SWPs for POGO workers for P5,000.