Journey to correcting last name – NBI Clearance

Okay, NBI Clearance. I looked online and there’s not much article or blog post about someone who has corrected their name before. Ofc, there’s a how-to article from NBI themselves, for women who need to update their last name due to marriage, but that’s not what we need.

Progress

I prematurely emailed “[email protected]” enquiring about the correction process. Prematurely because I will learn later that there is some information on their website.
After checking the NBI clearance registration website: https://clearance.nbi.gov.ph/, I was able to see this popup:

My first thought is, “register again”? I better be able to use my main email address. As much as possible, I want to keep using my personal email address for everything, especially for these government websites.

I went to their forgot password form and see if I indeed used my personal email address to register my first NBI clearance.
And yup, NBI website sent me the reset password link, I reset and logged in. And I am very happy to see the “Edit Information” button ? I immediately clicked on it.

Now, what I want to do is see if I can change the email address of this account to something else, so that I can free up this email address from their record and use this to register again.
Unfortunately, the email address field is read-only (locked), hence I cannot modify it:

Needless to say, the Last name field is also “locked”/read-only, so I cannot readily correct my Lastname here. And actually, even if this field can be updated, I will learn later that it’s useless.

In conclusion, its not possible to reuse your email address if you need to correct something on NBI clearance website. boo! ?

Okay, now we really need to register a new account on NBI clearance website. There’s actually a trick to somehow still use my personal email, and this is possible because I am using Gmail. It’s via using “task specific” email. TLDR; i just need to register using “<my_personal_email>+<anything_here>@gmail.com” and all emails will still be received by my personal email.
I was able to register, this time using the correct “ñ” on my last name.
Then NBI clearance website sent me OTP on my phone and email. That worked and I was able to log in.
Then Boom, the NBI clearance website still showing up the “n” version of my last name instead of “ñ”. I almost thought I made a typo error again but since I made a habit of taking a screenshot of forms before I submit them online, I was able to confirm I really put “ñ” on the form.

Apparently, you need to know first-hand that you will need to ask the Personnel to adjust the clearance they will print for you. But I imagine you will need to be very vigilant, once you saw someone who will process your clearance, immediately tell them they should adjust it for “ñ”. Seriously, ñ in your name is a hassle
For now, I will deprioritize correcting my NBI clearance for the following reasons:
- NBI clearance is not really an ID, there’s really no regular need for it
- NBI clearance has an expiration, even if I correct it now if there’s no use for it, I’ll just end up redoing all of these again
- NBI clearance requires payment to process
- You need 2 valid IDs. At the moment, the only valid ID I have with the correct last name is my Voter’s ID, which I need to renew as well. Though they say a Birth certificate is okay to use, but personnel can probably just contest it.
- For now, I’ll prioritise getting UMID ID or Postal ID.

NBI has replied to my email last March 6th, their short reply says that they do not support Ñ on the clearance certificates they issue.

My quest to get Ñ on the NBI clearance has failed. But at least it has been cleared up that Ñ is considered as N for them.