PIMENTEL PROPOSES CADASTRAL SURVEY OF ENTIRE COUNTRY

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino "Nene" Q. Pimentel, Jr. (PDP-Laban) is proposing a cadastral survey of the entire country to identify the legitimate landowners or claimants and effectively curb the proliferation of fake land titles.

Pimentel filed Senate Bill 276 authorizing the Land Management Bureau to undertake the cadastral survey and allocating funds for the purpose under the annual General Appropriations Act.

"Landowners must be protected against defective land titles. The integrity of the Torrens Title System, as the foundation of ownership to real property, must be enhanced, so that in the end, the faith and reliance of the people in the integrity of the land titles will be restored," he explained.

He said the first step towards stabilizing land titles is to ensure that land survey, which is the basis for land titles, be made accurate.

For lands already surveyed, the senator from Mindanao said a resurvey of the same areas would be beneficial to the owners or claimants so that ownership could be reaffirmed.

Pimentel said the widespread forgery of land titles and the modus operandi of syndicates specializing in fraudulent registration and titling of lands were extensively investigated by the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee when he was its chairman from 1998 to 2000.

The committee concluded that the whole system of land registration and titling of land was institutionally and intrinsically flawed.

The land forgery syndicates were found to be operating with impunity because they were in cahoots with unscrupulous officials of government agencies involved in the land titling system.

"The syndicates took advantage of the seriously flawed record management of the Land Registration Authority (LRA) which allowed the switching or tampering of important land documents," Pimentel said.

The committee likewise recommended the enactment of a law that would harmonize the system of land titling by concerned government agencies to avoid overlapping of function in order to reduce, if not completely eliminate, illegal titling activities.

Under the Pimentel bill, the Land Management Bureau is authorized to conduct a survey of the entire country to identify bonafide landowners or claimants.

The survey shall cover: research and reconnaissance, project control recovery and densification, computation of lot data, and political boundary surveys, computation and cartographic works, and setting of cadastral lots and boundary, and plans finalization and submission.