A quick scan of a QR code on a birth certificate was enough to stop a household service worker from flying out of Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Terminal 3, after the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) e-Verification mobile app returned a birth year of 2007 instead of 2001.
The woman, identified by the Bureau of Immigration (BI) only as “Mia,” was on her way to a job in Saudi Arabia with a connection through Dubai. She had told immigration officers she was born in 2001, which would have made her old enough to meet the minimum age required of Filipinos deploying abroad as household workers.
Officers ran her certificate through the app during standard document checks. According to Rhona Ruth Lagman, who heads the BI Immigration Protection and Border Enforcement Section (I-PROBES) at the terminal, the year it displayed conflicted sharply with the details recorded in her passport.
Mia is now in the hands of the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACAT), and the bureau will send her passport to the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) for action.
Her birth certificate was sent to the BI Anti-Fraud Section for laboratory examination, which found that the document was fake. Examiners determined that the year of birth had been altered so she would appear older than she is.
