Requesting for PSA Documents Online via the SERBILIS Online Facility

This topic may not fall squarely under personal finance, but it’s definitely adjacent. In my case, I needed to secure birth certificates for my siblings, as well as the birth and death certificates of my parents, to fulfill the documentary requirements for settling the estate tax after my mother’s passing.

Estate tax, sometimes referred to as inheritance tax, is imposed on the total value of a deceased person’s assets, such as real estate, personal property, and financial holdings. The taxable amount is based on the net estate, which is calculated by deducting allowable expenses like outstanding debts, funeral costs, and medical bills from the gross estate.

I’ll be diving deeper into the estate tax process in a future post. For now, I want to focus on one of the first hurdles: gathering the necessary documents.

Thanks to the Philippine Statistics Authority’s SERBILIS program, requesting civil registry documents has become significantly more convenient. Gone are the days of queuing for hours and sacrificing an entire workday just to file a request.

Through the online portal, you can now apply for:

Birth certificates - for yourself, your siblings, or your parents
Death certificates - (I chuckled when the site used to ask if you’re requesting this for others or for your own behalf)
Marriage certificates
CENOMAR - Certificate of No Marriage
CENODEATH - yes, that’s apparently a Certificate of No Death (which I think means there is no record of that person's death in their databases and is not meant to be definitive proof that a person is still alive)

The PSA now offers an online viewable version of these documents, accessible for 60 days via a secure access code. Physical copies are delivered via PhilPost for local deliveries and DHL for selected international destinations (check their website for the specific countries that are within their service area), and payments are processed online. There’s a bit of lead time involved (a few days if you are in Metro Manila or nearby provinces, and as much as a couple of weeks or longer if you are in the farther provinces or abroad), so if you’re working with a tight schedule, especially for estate-related matters, it’s best to initiate the requests early.

Reminders on who is authorized to request the documents. SERBILIS Site.

I did not wait for too long in my experience, and although the website says that it is important to leave an ID and an authorization letter if you are unable to accept the documents yourself, my experience is that the courier just handed the documents to a member of my household without any questions. It may be a case-by-case situation, so it's best to be prepared with an authorization letter and ID, just in case.

This online service is a welcome development in the modernization of government services at the national level in the Philippines. Usually, the national government tends to be slower to keep up with the times compared to the more progressive local government units (LGUs) out there, and it's always good to see the improvements when they are implemented.