A lawmaker questioned the alleged collection of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) of Php720 from overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) who would like to receive their OFW IDs.
ACTS-OFW Aniceto Bertiz III accused DOLE of collection of money from OFWs for their OFW ID or iDOLE, which is supposed to be free since the cards were only donated by a group to express their gratitude towards President Rodrigo Duterte.
“This ID should be free…[it is also] not a functioning card,” Bertiz said in an interview in Dobol B sa News TV.
Meanwhile, Bello earlier announced the scrapping of the OFW ID upon discovering that some officials were trying to make money from it.
“Merong nag-alok ng pera para diyan. Pinaghahatian. Sabi ko alam mo, itong iDOLE Card para sa OFW, dapat walang gastos ang gobyerno at dapat walang gastos ang OFW. Kaya kung ganyan ang plano niyo, mabuti pa scrap natin. Which I did,” Bello said.
“Scrap natin ito until we can find a system that will provide an I-DOLE Card to our OFWs at no expense to the government and especially at no expense to our OFWs,” he added.
OFW ID
In December 2017, DOLE began issuing the first batch of OFW IDs as Duterte’s “best gift” to millions of Filipinos working overseas.
Balik-Manggagawa (BM), or those vacationing OFWs, are required to log-in to their BM online accounts to apply for the ID, which they can use to avail of travel tax and terminal fee exemptions.
With the use of the ID, OFWs will no longer need to queue in transacting with agencies for their overseas employment as they can now access government services online during the further phases of the iDOLE eServices implementation.
