Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Passport Scam at DFA: A Billion Peso Scam

There is a one page paid advertisement in Inquirer today exposing the alleged scam at department of Foriegn Affairs. This is about their use of new technology in procesing of Passports. The project, as alleged, is overpriced by at least P50.00 pesos per passport.

The advertisement even included some documents related to the project and documents that even support their allegations. The group behind the expose is the college editors guild of the philippines. The group filed charges to Secretary Romulo and other people involve in the approval of the said project. The project was awarded to a foriegn company and there was no bidding.

If this allegation is true, this would amount to more than a billion peso scam. Since this expose is a paid advertisement, we have to get more information on this. I hope this is not true.

The government is again in the limelight not for good news but for anomalies that President Arroyo would always ignore.

1 comment:

  1. there's another scam that you don't know about, it's subtle and it shown as legit. encoders at dfa seems to mistype your name in your passport and and when claiming day comes you find out your passport has an error you are asked to pay another 500 pesos. My passport was in my maiden name, i applied for renewal with my married name on it. the encoder read my application and type my maiden. i asked why he did so he said it would be updated to my married name when the renewal of passport is in process. but come the day of claiming to my surprise after the long wait at the directors office there were no records found using my maiden name and lo and behold it was still under my maiden name! the lying encoder was wrong! he scammed me and probably a lot more. I asked him a question why he encoded my maiden name instead of my married name he flat out lied. I paid for another 500 pesos for their mistake. What pisses me off is you can't do anything about it because you want it to get corrected. I want to share this so that when other people apply for a passport especially if there's a change in name. be extra careful. if an error was made they blame it on you and you pay for it!

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