GENERAL SANTOS CITY (MindaNews/31 October) — Processing birth certificates and other related documents here is now much easier and faster with the completion of the Office of the Local Civil Registrar’s (LCR) computerization program.
City Mayor Ronnel Rivera said all transactions at the LCR are now fully automated and it is now developing a computerized registry or database of all records that were accumulated in the previous years.
With the automation, he said transactions that previously took several days to complete may now be processed in a day or even less.
“This is part of our continuing commitment to improve our operations and provide better services to our constituents,” he said.
The mayor said they earlier tapped the local government’s Information and Communication Technologies Division to spearhead the computerization of the LCR’s operations.
He said the initiative involved the installation of the Philippine Civil Registry Information System at the city LCR office.
The city government had allocated a supplemental budget of around P850,000 to facilitate the purchase of computers, printers and scanners for the LCR.
Rivera said they pushed for the computerization of the LCR as part of their continuing efforts to rationalize transactions at the city hall.
He said they deemed it necessary to upgrade the LCR’s systems so it can deliver more effective and efficient services.
The mayor said the installed LCR system mainly covers computerized data-banking, archiving and document retrieval.
“Before this, our LCR personnel were using old typewriters and manually typing information in the forms for documents like birth and marriage certificates,” he said.
Rivera sa
id the city LCR’s archives are mainly paper files that are kept in shelves at its storage room, rendering data banking and retrieval quite difficult.
Jen Gabayeron, marriage division head of the city LCR, said they already lack enough spaces at their office for the storage of their archives.
She said their office normally process and pile up thousands of documents each ye
ar.
“But with the computerization, we can now process, retrieve and store our data easier and much faster,” she said. (MindaNews)
