The elusive straight path

Last week, a friend went to the city treasurer’s office in her home city to claim the tax declaration certificates for a house and lot she had recently bought. The application had been filed weeks earlier, and she got word that the documents were ready. But the man who attended to her said it was not possible to get the papers on that same day because certain steps were still needed, and the official who will sign them was not in the office. She explained that she had taken a leave from work in another province to be able to attend to the matter, but got the same indifferent response.

In the course of their conversation, my friend mentioned the name of another friend who turned out to be this official’s friend as well. Suddenly, he changed his tune and told her to wait while he checked to see what he could do. After some waiting, he came back to tell her that her documents were ready, and she would have to pay a fee of P140. She handed the payment over and got her documents, but to her surprise, the official receipt was only for P100. Annoyed at the arbitrariness and brazenness of this official, she desisted nonetheless from raising a fuss; she already managed to get the needed papers, after all. I chided her for reinforcing the behavior of that corrupt petty bureaucrat by letting it pass unquestioned.

Two weeks ago, I was riding with a friend in her car when she was stopped by one of those mobile teams testing for smoke emissions. Asked if it would take long as we were late for a meeting, the man promised it would only take “a few minutes.” Five vehicles had already been stopped ahead of us, waiting to be tested, and I could tell that they had been there for much more than a few minutes. The officer took over the driver’s seat and pumped the gas pedal full force. Naturally, smoke blew out of the exhaust pipe, so he told her they would have to test her exhaust emissions, and we would have to wait for our turn. We were told that if the vehicle failed the test, they would confiscate the license plate of the car. Meanwhile, these men were oblivious of numerous jeepneys belching profuse smoke as they passed by. When we protested that they were ignoring obvious offenders, they told us they were only testing private vehicles that day. My friend, worried about our meeting and resigned that these men would eventually tell her that her car failed the test anyway, instructed them to just take away her license plate, just so we could be on our way. After a huddle, the men surprised us and told us we could go, even as the others ahead of us were still waiting. We couldn’t help wonder whether we were let go because my friend had made it quite obvious she was not about to negotiate.

Three weeks ago, my son’s Korean girlfriend left to return home. It proved to be an unnecessarily annoying, tedious and expensive departure. When she attempted to leave on her appointed date, the immigration officer at the airport stopped her for lack of an exit clearance certificate (ECC)—something she, and we, had never heard of before. The officer took her to task, saying “she was supposed to know about these things.” Yet she swears that through two visa extensions, she had never been informed nor seen any notices regarding the ECC at the Bureau of Immigration (BI) offices. Her aborted departure forced her to waste a long-held nonrefundable airline ticket and buy a new one for two days later, at much higher cost.

In this information age, it’s a wonder why we can’t have the same databases that are checked by the issuers of the ECC be directly accessible at airport immigration computers. That way, we can spare foreigners the trouble of trooping to the BI offices to obtain a piece of paper. Even granting the need for such document, there are several reasons why my son and his friend were justifiably annoyed with the situation. For one, the requirement does not appear to be adequately publicized. It doesn’t help that the BI website seems constantly unreachable. (I have yet to succeed in accessing it since the incident happened.) My son has since learned from various online blogs of many similar cases of aggrieved foreign travelers being stopped at the airport for lack of an ECC—as if it were the best-kept secret in town!

The airport immigration officers told my son and his friend that the ECC could only be obtained at the BI main office in Manila. So they dutifully traveled the following day to the main office in Intramuros (all the way from Los Baños, Laguna where we live), only to be advised to go to the North Edsa branch office, where processing was supposedly faster (and indeed it was, they learned). But why the conflicting information from the BI people themselves? Moreover, they were advised not to buy an airline ticket before obtaining the ECC as under new rules, the ECC must be obtained within three days prior to departure. This forces the passenger to pay much more for his/her departure ticket; we all know that tickets purchased well in advance could be much cheaper. Why make such an unfair imposition on our foreign visitors? And we wonder why we couldn’t attract as many foreign visitors as our neighbors do?

Many of us are led to lament how too many people working in government still seem to find great difficulty with genuine public service, honesty, consistency and even common sense. Instead we find too much of unnecessary hurdles, brazen corruption, arbitrariness and ineptness. While I do believe that “daang  matuwid” is making real progress, I can’t help feeling that the road ahead remains quite long indeed.

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