ICT in its proper place

“I know why the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) missed its target for the first semester,” my son told me over the weekend.

Last week, he had to pay the second installment on the income tax return (ITR) he filed last April at the BIR Revenue District Office next to our town in Laguna. The first installment had been paid at the designated branch of the Land Bank of the Philippines (LBP), as required. A 15-kilometer ride away from our home (which, given traffic conditions, can take up to an hour), he had hoped that the second installment could be paid at the local LBP branch in our town. After all, it is now standard practice for banks to accept deposits at any branch. But not so for this particular transaction; he could only do it at that same LBP branch where his first payment had been made, he was told.

So off he went dutifully, ITR in hand and the needed cash in his pocket, and made the time-consuming trip to that bank. But he (along with others) was promptly instructed to go to the BIR office, yet another ride away, to obtain the BIR Form 605 needed to make the payment. The bank was to close in 30 minutes, so he knew he couldn’t possibly make it to the BIR office and back to the bank on time.

“Why can’t the LBP branch just stock up on the forms, or why can’t the BIR provide them the forms?” he asked. After all, they must have known how common this experience was. After learning that he could download the form online, he just went home, nothing accomplished after all the time, effort and expense incurred. The next day knowing better, he managed to complete his payment without further delay. But it took him two trips to the bank 15 km away, and so many hours lost, to be able to fulfill his duty as a contributor to the nation’s coffers.

“They could have easily stocked up on the forms at the bank,” he complained. “They could have put up a poster explaining the exact procedure and requirements, especially for a novice like me. And they could have made it possible for me to pay it at their branch near our home. Aren’t we in the computer age, after all?”

Aren’t we, indeed? Last week’s article documenting my travails in trying to obtain a National Bureau of Investigation clearance elicited a lot of mail. Most of them told similar hardship stories in obtaining clearances from the NBI, and more so with the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA), which turns out to be much more notorious than the NBI for inflicting undue suffering on its clients. “Your experience was a sashay in a park compared to the plight of thousands of overseas Filipino workers facing the POEA’s inefficient service (when applying for their exit clearance), often accompanied by discourteousness,” wrote a reader. The Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) also had its share of hate mail from readers telling of their ordeals in obtaining retirement benefits due them.

The common lament of our readers’ mail is the propensity of our government to inflict undue suffering on us taxpaying citizens of the republic, now also the declared “bosses” of our one-year-old President and, it follows, of our public servants as well. But how can we be bosses when we are treated like slaves to obtain proof that we are not in the tiny minority of our population who have a criminal record or court case? There is some injustice in the way the great majority of us who have never been at odds with the law must endure the punishment that applying for an NBI clearance, POEA exit clearance, or GSIS retirement benefits entails.

And yet, all of this punishment is entirely avoidable, as the National Statistics Office has already demonstrated with its 10-year old e-Census service. A reader asks, “Why do we even need to get an NBI clearance? If an employer or the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) requires it from a job or passport applicant, they should be able to obtain it themselves, and not put the onus on the individual. That is how other countries do it. The DFA should be able to access NBI records directly, and employers, public or private, can hire an agency that undertakes security verification.” We are, after all, in the Information Age.

Another reader wrote: “One of the initiatives of the Commission on Information and Communication Technology (CICT), before it was demoted to an office under the Department of Science and Technology, was to create a centralized biometrics system for all government agencies. That way, you don’t have to apply for something like this every time you need paperwork done.” Now that CICT has been downgraded, will this project be set aside? Rather than be downgraded, the CICT, in the view of many (myself included), should have been elevated to a full department. Many countries already have a dedicated Ministry or Department of Information and Communication Technology. What more for us, where the sector has become a major driver of our economy and society?

To my mind, we need to put ICT in its proper place, and that is in the service of our people. “These agencies’ ill-guided view of retaining their backward, manual processes in an era of cheap computing,” wrote yet another reader, “is almost insulting to the modern Filipino, who is a prolific mobile phone and Internet user.” Surely, there must be more imaginative ways to achieve the intent of the NBI and POEA clearances, and all those other documents our citizens have to endure undue punishment to obtain.

As for the BIR’s missed targets, my son’s explanation was a no-brainer: “How can you expect people to pay their taxes faithfully, when you punish them as they try to do so?”

(E-mail: cielito.habito@gmail.com )