No more Alice Guos? Philippine lawmaker seeks new law against fake citizenship

Sherwin Gatchalian says the bill is a priority for Congress to pass, but analysts warn Manila must tackle patronage politics as well

A new bill that seeks to establish a new civil registration system in the Philippines in a bid to prevent “more Alice Guos” is a step in the right direction, but may not be adequate to address the country’s deep-seated patronage politics and bribery, observers warn.

Filed by Philippine Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, the bill proposes to create a new civil registration and vital statistics system that aims to prevent foreigners from acquiring Philippine citizenship through fraudulent means, such as through fake birth certificates.

The system would be designed to “accurately establish an individual’s identity for both administrative and legal purposes”.

Gatchalian identified the bill as priority legislation for the new Congress, which began this month. His proposal came just weeks after a Philippine court ruled that Alice Guo, a former mayor of Bamban town in Tarlac province at the centre of the controversy surrounding the notorious Philippine offshore gaming operators (Pogos), was a Chinese citizen.

“We want a new system so that no more Alice Guos would emerge, those pretending to be Filipinos and would infiltrate the government to deceive,” Gatchalian said in a statement on Tuesday.

The bill, filed on Monday, also proposes “higher penalties” for offences such as the forgery of civil registry documents, submission of false information during civil registration, and easing the preparation of civil registry documents that contain fraudulent information.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr ordered the closure of Pogos in July last year after authorities discovered their links to criminal activities such as scam operations, human trafficking and torture.

In July last year, the National Bureau of Investigation uncovered nearly 1,200 falsified birth certificates dating back to 2016, mostly belonging to Chinese nationals, which were registered in Sta Cruz town in Davao del Sur.

Gatchalian said that the multiple falsified documents found in Davao could amount to “200 Alice Guos, which is very concerning”.

In January, the country’s Office of the Solicitor General said that it would prioritise cancelling all birth certificates fraudulently acquired by foreign nationals and forfeiting the properties and assets acquired in the country through fake citizenship.

The country’s laws place restrictions on foreign ownership of properties in the Philippines, with false birth certificates suspected of being used to circumvent these laws.

However, Philippine authorities continue to struggle with the fallout of Pogos in the country, which once lured in over 100,000 Chinese and other foreign workers catering to mainly overseas Chinese customers. Today, over 9,000 former workers remain at large.

Patronage at play

Matthew David Ordonez, a political science lecturer at De La Salle University, said that the proposed bill was “good on paper” but added that Guo’s case was possible not because of the lack of regulation, but due to the selective nature of enforcement and administration by officials.

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“Alice Guo benefited from what is known as the padrino [patronage] system, where backers allowed her to slip through the cracks of registry systems,” he told This Week in Asia.

Ordonez warned that “more Alice Guos” might emerge in the future if the country did not target the eradication of its patronage system and enforce stricter adherence to regulations.

While updating penalties for fraud-related offences was necessary, “it must be combined with stricter enforcement and stronger bureaucracy”, he added.

Guo was thrust into media headlines last year following a government raid on an 80,000-square-metre Pogo facility in the town of Bamban, Tarlac province in March. During the raid, nearly 700 workers were rescued, and evidence of criminal activities, such as scamming operations, was uncovered.

Authorities found a billing statement and a vehicle registered in Guo’s name during the raid and later discovered that the then mayor partly owned the land on which the facility was built.

Doubts about her identity surfaced when Guo admitted during a Senate hearing that her birth certificate was only registered when she was 17 and had no schooling records, claiming that she was home-schooled and was a love child of her Chinese father to a Filipina maid.

At a hearing last year, Gatchalian showed papers of the Guo family’s application for a special investors’ resident visa with the Bureau of Immigration and Board of Investments.

The National Bureau of Investigation’s (NBI) fingerprint examination found that Guo’s fingerprints were identical to those of a woman named Guo Hua Ping.

The NBI also later presented documents of another woman named Alice Leal Guo with the same birth date as the mayor had claimed, which Hontiveros questioned as a case of stolen identity.

The Department of Foreign Affairs has cancelled her passport on the basis of fraud, while the Office of the Solicitor General filed a petition to cancel her birth certificate in July 2024.

In October, a Cambodian-Chinese betting kingpin, She Zhijiang, currently imprisoned in Thailand for running illegal online gambling operations, alleged in an Al Jazeera documentary that Guo was a Chinese “asset” like him, who had connections to the Communist Party in Fujian province.

Sherwin Ona, an international fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taiwan, called the proposal “timely” given the gaps in the Philippines’ civil registry system, but stressed that “the devil is in the details” as electronic databases might also be exploited by bad actors.

“Electronic databases are fine, but without enough safeguards, their vulnerabilities can increase and the loopholes magnified. Basic design frameworks and adherence to the principles of transparency and efficiency are a must,” he told This Week in Asia.

Ona said that integrating local databases into a national repository was crucial and should entail changes in organisational structures and a retraining of the civil workforce tasked to handle these systems.

Cybersecurity remains an important aspect of this plan, with sufficient mechanisms required to ensure the integrity and security of public data, according to Ona.

“Penalties are important, but systems integrity is vital,” he said.