Thursday, July 19, 2007 CH to set up NSO satellite office at memorial library
CEBU City will have its own National Statistics Office (NSO) satellite office soon, but the public will have to pay a higher fee for civil registry records and wait longer to get them.
City Civil Registrar Evangeline Abatayo said they cannot release birth certificates and other records on the same day the request was made since they don’t have the database for it.
Because of this, Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s plan to set up a VIP and express lane is not possible since all requests will have to be forwarded to Manila, she said.
Osmeña said the setting up of the office will be fast tracked so as not to cause further delay and inconvenience to those who were served by the NSO office along M.J. Cuenco Ave., which closed down last Monday.
Program
The satellite office will be at the Rizal Memorial Library compound along Osmeña Blvd., Cebu City.
Instead of the P125 the NSO is charging for every request, Abatayo said the City will collect additional P50 in surcharges for every birth, death and marriage certificate that they will release.
Abatayo hoped to set up NSO’s Batch Request Entry System (Breqs) program yesterday but since their computers are not fast enough to accommodate the program, they will have to wait for City Hall to buy additional four units of desktop computers.
“Once we set up the system, we expect to process up to 1,000 requests per day but it cannot be released on the same day because we don’t have the database. The requests will have to be sent to Manila, which might take two to three working days,” she told Sun.Star Cebu last night.
The city’s satellite office might send the diskettes containing the requests to NSO central office or course them through the National Economic and Development Authority regional office for the latter to email to NSO.
Advantage
But since there are usually hitches in the transmittal of requests and processing in Manila, Abatayo said they will advice their clients to claim the documents 10 days after the application was filed.
In his news conference yesterday noon, Osmeña proposed the VIP lane to neutralize fixers who will take advantage of NSO clients.
Instead of paying fixers P400 for the service that they can directly get at P125, the mayor said the satellite office will offer it at P500.
The City will use the excess amount to provide snacks and a television set for clients who opt to line up while waiting for their requests.
“That is being discussed. I had proposed that we have a special charge that will account for about 10 percent of the clients. We will charge P500 for a VIP line and we will use that for the snacks of the other 90 percent. This will discourage fixing,” Osmeña said.
If it pushes through, the mayor said his proposal will be subject to City Council approval. (LCR)
