“Since this is an innovation, there are still a lot of glitches,” LRA Deputy administrator Ronald Ortile admitted at the National Developers Convention on Friday.

He said the computerization process involved manually encoding the data in land titles. “The problem here is our land titles are not only composed of numbers but are narrative. So imagine we have to encode manually everything in it,” Ortile said, adding that most LRA employees, who are aged between 40 to 50 years old, are also not really technologically savvy.

“We admit talagang may problema dyan so we continue to train them.” So far, some 1,900 LRA personnel have been trained, while another 820 are still ongoing training.

He stressed the need for accuracy in encoding data because the law requires that land titles must  be void of errors, otherwise  parties have to go to court “kahit minor typo error ’yan.”

Hence, Ortile said they introduced a “layer” to avoid such process. “But the whole computerization process requires some time for our people to get a hang of things.”

In his presentation, Ortile said 88 percent of total transactions with the LRA are now computerized.

Currently, the transaction registry for registered land takes five days but this will soon be cut down to three days while the process involving chattel mortgages currently takes four days but would soon be  cut down to a day.

Likewise, Ortile said there would be cashless payments, as well as online verification of land registries anywhere.

He noted that the cashless payment concept has already been approved by the Bureau of Internal Revenue while “there’s an ongoing compatibility testing with the DENR [Department of Environment and Natural Resources] for the other
processes.”

Ortile said about 80 percent of land titles, or 19.75 million in the LRA database, have been converted into digital files, while 4.75 million titles are in the process of conversion and would be finished before the year ends.