ACT-CIS Partylist Rep. Eric Yap has urged Foreign Affairs Sec. Teodoro Locsin to investigate the anomaly in the issuance of Philippine passports where fake birth certificate and NBI clearance were allegedly being used.
Yap said they discovered this anomaly when they rescued an overseas Filipino worker (OFW) from Saudi Arabia whose recruiters changed her age from 20 to 21 and was issued a passport by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA).
Under the law, an OFW needs to be 21 years old before he/she can be allowed to work abroad.
Yap believes there’s a syndicate operating at DFA that manning agencies pay to acquire passports for the people they recruit.
The parents of the OFW they rescued reached out to ACT-CIS as she complained she was abused by her employers.
ACT-CIS coordinated with the Overseas Filipino Worker Welfare Administration (OWWA) for the rescue of the OFW, who was from Compostela Valley in Mindanao.
