Every future employer would want their employees as crime-free as possible. Thus, the need for NBI clearance at pre-employment. Having very, God-forgive-me common names, Joy and I have “hits” or namesakes and thus we need to wait for more than a week to get things straightened out. But that’s not where the long red taping started.
Let me walk you through the long, tiring and even-better-if process of getting the precious clearance. First, we opted to go to Robinsons Galeria in Ortigas since they process government documents like passports, philhealth ID and NBI clearance inside the mall.
We got there a little before 10am as that’s mall hours. Little did we know that applicants lined outside the mall as early as 8am to get their priority numbers. And sow e waited till the mall opened and the guard told us to go to the NBI clearance kiosk anyway and ask if queue numbers are still available. Once inside, we who don’t have numbers lined up again. As we got our own numbers that 10:05am, the guy told us that those numbers will be called out by 2pm.
Okay, we thought. At least we can still get Joy to go through medical certification in the nearby building.
When we got back at 2, another hour of waiting. And then finally, the guy said for us to come back on October 22 (more than a week later) to get the clearance.
That day Joy came back and was asked to go to the NBI headquarters along UN Avenue to be interviewed.
As always is true in any government agency one can go to, the staff were VERY polite (thank you cybercrime law for forcing me to write that) and urgent.
They would scold you, make you wait on end, ask you questions that didn’t make sense, and make you wait again. Okay, so Joy had to be interviewed because a namesake had a pending case and they wanted to make sure it wasn’t her.
#1 — Aren’t they supposed to know that without us having to physically appear before them? My God! What age and year are we in now? I thought they’re the mighty bureau investigators? If they could spend millions of pesos per year to implement the most intelligent law thus far, why didn’t they allot hefty budgets to upgrade this old fashioned agency? Duh!
#2 — Can’t they do interviews in their satellite offices?
#3 — Why has it become a “trend” for these people to act like a god among us and make us wait for something that could actually take less time? Don’t they know where part of our taxes go? To their paychecks!
I remember Sen. Lacson in one of his campaign speeches saying, he will cut all the red tapes. I wish I had asked him to put that in writing. =)
