My long journey to correct the surname on all of my documents — and the pain of having “ñ” in your name

I fucked up. All my document are using “Mena” as my surname, instead of “Meña”. All of if — passport, SSS, Pagibig, NBI clearance, Police clearance, all of it.

I was taking for granted that I should be strictly using “ñ” for my surname as much as possible. But on my defence, some institutions doesn’t always support “ñ”. For example, BDO member detail updates form will not allow you to use “ñ” to be inputted on its form:

There was even an article that DFA purposely tried to get rid of “ñ” some time ago.

Some international institution, websites, apps and platforms will not also allow you to use “ñ” on their registration form. When this happens I’ll just opt to using “n” instead. All of these added up on my mentality that it wasn’t a big deal.

Until I realised this could bite me in the ass in the future. Luckily, it hasn’t happened yet.

It was wrong from the start

My original birth certificate has my surname as “Mena”, not “Meña”. Thanks to my mother, it was corrected in 2012.

Btw, as a side note, even after the correction, “Mena” is what still appears in the last name field of the birth certificate. There will just be a note on the left-hand side of the birth certificate stating the court order that the last name should be corrected from “Mena” to “Meña”.

Unfortunately, before this was corrected I have a copy of the old birth certificate. This old copy of the birth certificate is what I xerox and scan whenever I am asked for a birth certificate. There’s a chance that because of this old birth certificate, my documents are all using “Mena”.

Since I’m pretty sure that I use the “ñ” version as much as possible when I fill forms by hand, there’s only a chance that the encoder will deliberately omit the “ñ” and use “n” instead.

Whatever the case is, I need to make sure that from now on, I should be vigilant that whenever I am filling a form I should use “ñ”, and that when I am asked to cross-check if my details are correct, I need to make sure they encoded “ñ” instead of “n”. ?

The start

Luckily (very luckily), I saw that my voter’s ID is using “Meña” as its last name. The only caveat is that this ID requires renewal. I failed to vote three consecutive times. That’s because I lost faith in COMELEC, especially after they leaked all my personal details even including my fingerprint biometric, but that’s probably for another blog post.

Another document I was able to update was my PhilHealth membership details. More than 2 years ago, I have to update the list of my beneficiaries to include my wife and my son, with that, I got the chance to update my Last name to the “ñ” version. I don’t remember the exact details but I visited their branch here in Malolos and I imagine the process is still the same as how you would normally update your membership details. I probably included the corrected version of my birth certificate — but I am not sure. But I remember you can attach some documents when you are updating your PhilHealth data because I am sure that I attached a letter to PhilHealth authorizing the inclusion of my wife as beneficiary.

The list

Here’s the list of the documents I have corrected and am planning to update, hopefully in the following order:

1. PhilHealth — done in 2018. I can be confirm this by logging in on their website and downloading my PhilHealth Membership Data Record:

2. Voter’s ID (Comelec) – to renew
3. Passport
4. TIN/BIR
5. PagIbig
6. NBI Clearance
7. Police Clearance
8. SSS
   form: https://www.sss.gov.ph/sss/DownloadContent%3FfileName%3DSSSForms_Change_Request.pdf
   example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNJrHHIBXvw
9. With SSS data, get UMID ID https://ph.news.yahoo.com/umid-id-application-easy-steps-030041557.html

This blog post will be updated as I journey to correct all my surname. Please note that this journey started while there is pandemic, hence going outside should be done as minimal as possible.

Goodluck to me!