MORE NEWS, MOUNTAIN PROVINCE

Survey results inaccurate; MP folks silent on wealth
By Angel Baybay

BONTOC, Mountain Province – Officials urged residents to conscientiously answer survey questionnaires or correctly give out information to interviews regularly conducted by government offices so socio-economic situation of the province could be appraised better.

This, after policy-makers and planners observed data collected on some areas of the province in previous years did not to reflect the real scenario on that particular place.

Gov. Maximo Dalog earlier urged constituents to cooperate with barangay officials, health workers, day care workers and data gatherers.

He also ordered barangay secretaries to help monitor and document special events that may occur in their respective barangays. Special events include births and deaths and the circumstances of such deaths particularly if it is related to any disaster.

This was again reiterated by the Provincial Planning and Development Office in its radio program recently saying that plans are based primarily on data gathered or submitted by the municipal and barangay governments.

Mary Jane Tumapang of the PPDO revealed that one of the reasons why plans do not answer the real need of people or that social programs do not cater to the priority needs of communities is because of incorrect data.

Aside from policy and planning purposes, data submitted by municipalities are also used in determining possible recipients of special programs and aids. It would be recalled that some municipalities were surprised with the selection of less needy towns as recipient of the services offered by the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.

But as it was in other instances, the selection was based on available data. Some towns simply refuse to continuously update its data base. Worse, some would “freshen” it believing that a not so good data reflect poor performance among officials.

From past experiences, data collectors found difficulty gathering information most especially those with regards to the economic status of families. “People tend to withhold or give incorrect information that has relation to their economic standing,” one barangay official complained.

But some officials said community people usually refrained from giving out information indicative of their actual economic worth for fear that will be used for taxation purposes.

Others said that it is in the culture of the people not to talk about their wealth. “No one, even a millionaire will ever say that he is rich,” the officials said.

The fear of using collected data as basis for taxation was however allayed by data collecting offices. These are used solely for planning and policy formulation.