Locsin scraps birth certificate requirement for renewal of passport

MANILA, Philippines — Foreign Affairs Secretary Teddy Boy Locsin has removed the birth certificate requirement for renewal of passport.

In a Twitter post, Locsin shared a photo of Department Order (DO) 03-2019, which he dubbed as the “emancipation proclamation from bureaucratic crap.”

Voila! The emancipation proclamation from bureaucratic crap. pic.twitter.com/kyven04l9h

— Teddy Locsin Jr. (@teddyboylocsin) January 15, 2019

Section 1 of the order states that, “the presentation of birth certificate in the application for the renewal of passport shall not be required.”

However, the directive will only cover regular renewal of passports and shall not cover the following cases:

• first time passport applications
• renewal applications for lost and mutilated passports
• renewal requiring changes in the passport entries
• renewal of old brown and green passports bearing no complete middle name
• applicants included in DFA’s watchlsit

Locsin’s DO 03-2019 came days after he disclosed the agency is “rebuilding” its files “from scratch” because a previous outsourced passport maker “took all” the applicants data when its contract was terminated.

“Because previous contractor got pissed when terminated it made off with data. We did nothing about it or couldn’t because we were in the wrong,” he said in his personal Twitter account last January 9.

“It won’t happen again. Passports pose national security issues and cannot be kept back by private entities. Data belongs to the state,” he added.

This was in response to a tweet by DFA Assistant Secretary Elmer Cato, where he reminded applicants who plan to renew their brown or green passports or maroon machine-readable passports (MRP) “to submit birth certificates because we need to capture and store the document in our database as we no longer have the physical copy of the document submitted when they first applied.”