Starting next month, Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) can access their overseas employment certificate (OEC) through a digital app to be launched by the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW),
According to DMW Secretary Susan Ople, they were supposed to launch the program on October 15 but they decided to push it back to October 27 to ensure that the digital portal is polished and error-free.
“The OECs of the workers will now be downloaded on their mobile device. We were set to launch on October 15. But we decided to move it back to October 27,” DMW Secretary Susan Ople said during the DMW presentation at the Joint Maritime Committees of European Business Chambers.
Ople explained, they delayed the launch of the initiative, which is in partnership with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), to further test the digital portal.
“We pushed it back a bit just to ensure that once we roll it out, the glitches will really just be the bare minimum,” she reasoned.
According to Ople, the digitalization will slash the processing time of the documents of OFWs as well as simplify it.
“The experience of a ship owner for example, in Germany will be the same as a ship owner in Japan, and a worker in Hong Kong will experience, will have the same experience as a nurse in the US,” she said.
In coordination with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), the aim of the move is to help Filipino workers in various countries to facilitate and simplify their access to their OEC.
Through the said app, OFWs can store their passport image and OEC in a QR format that will be viewed by the Bureau of Immigration (BI).
Ople added, other personnel files can also be stored in the said application.
