Philippine Statistical Act of 2013 (RA 10625)

Also known as: RA 10625 · Republic Act No. 10625 · The Statistical Act of 2013 · The PSA's creating statute — the succession styling of this wiki's statistical-system entries

Government

Definition

The Philippine Statistical Act of 2013 is Republic Act No. 10625 — signed by President Benigno S. Aquino III on September 12, 2013 and, by its Section 35, taking effect upon approval — the statute that reorganized the Philippine Statistical System (PSS), replaced the framework built by Executive Order No. 121 of 1987, and created the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). (LawPhil — RA 10625, Official Gazette — RA 10625) Section 5 provides: “There shall be created a Philippine Statistics Authority, hereinafter referred to as the PSA, attached to the NEDA,” constituted from the personnel of four bodies — the National Statistics Office (NSO), the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) Technical Staff, the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS), and the Bureau of Labor and Employment Statistics (BLES) — and declares that “The data produced by the PSA shall be the official and controlling statistics of the government.” (LawPhil — RA 10625)

The Act’s companion creation is the PSA Board, the highest policymaking body on statistical matters, chaired by “the NEDA Director-General, as Chairperson,” with the Secretary of Budget and Management as Vice Chairperson (Sec. 7). (LawPhil — RA 10625) Its planning instrument is the Philippine Statistical Development Program (PSDP) — the compendium of “all statistical activities to be undertaken by the PSS” that the PSA prepares and the Board approves (Secs. 6(l), 24, 9(h)) — and its civil-registry clause charges the PSA to administer civil registration under Act No. 3753 (Sec. 6(e)). (LawPhil — RA 10625) The abolition clause closed the old agencies: Section 28 provides that “The NSO, the BAS of the Department of Agriculture, the BLES of the Department of Labor and Employment, and the NSCB shall be abolished” and their appropriations, records, properties and personnel transferred to the PSA — the register this wiki’s Bureau of Agricultural Statistics entry carries for the DA statistics bureau’s end. (LawPhil — RA 10625)

Identities

Source Type	Identity
Wikipedia	N/A — no standalone article for the Act (verified this session); the statute is documented within the Philippine Statistics Authority article
Wikidata	N/A — no item for the Act (search verified this session); the created authority is Philippine Statistics Authority (Q17067223)
DBpedia	Philippine_Statistics_Authority — resource carrying the Act’s record (verified this session)
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	statistics — “A discipline, principally within applied mathematics, concerned with the systematic study of the collection, presentation, analysis, and interpretation of data” (the Act’s subject matter, not the Act)
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A — LC authorities unreachable this session (HTTP 403)
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A
Google Scholar	Philippine Statistical Act of 2013 RA 10625 Philippine Statistics Authority PSA Board NEDA NSO NSCB BAS BLES abolition Section 28 civil registry Act 3753 PSDP National Statistician EO 121 repeal
ConceptNet	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

RA 10625
Republic Act No. 10625
The Statistical Act of 2013
The PSA’s creating statute — the succession styling of this wiki’s statistical-system entries

Examples and Analogies

Four counting offices, one authority: where the EO 121 system had a census office, a coordination board, an agriculture statistics bureau, and a labor statistics bureau under different departments, the Act folded all four into a single PSA — consolidation in place of coordination. (Wikipedia — PSA)
A board chaired by the planning agency: the PSA Board under the NEDA Director-General seats the statistical system inside the government’s economic-planning machinery — statistics governed where the development plan is written. (LawPhil — RA 10625)
Verified statutory data:
Short title and approval: “Philippine Statistical Act of 2013” (Sec. 1); approved September 12, 2013, Aquino III; effect upon approval (Sec. 35) (LawPhil — RA 10625, Official Gazette — RA 10625)
Merged bodies: NSO, NSCB Technical Staff, BAS, BLES (Sec. 5); banking and financial statistics stayed with the Bangko Sentral (LawPhil — RA 10625)
Functions: censuses of “population, housing, agriculture, fisheries, business, industry and other sectors”; civil registration under Act 3753; national accounts; standards; the PSDP (Sec. 6) (LawPhil — RA 10625)
Abolitions: NSO, BAS, BLES, NSCB — records and personnel to the PSA (Sec. 28) (LawPhil — RA 10625)
Companion body: the Philippine Statistical Research and Training Institute (Official Gazette — RA 10625)

Usage Scenarios

1. Citing the PSA’s Legal Basis

Researchers quote the Act’s Section 5 creation and official-statistics clauses as the statutory warrant behind any post-2013 census, survey, or civil-registry document — the application this wiki’s Census of Agriculture entry makes to the 2022 CAF. (LawPhil — RA 10625)

2. Fixing the 2013 Abolition Register

Historians date the NSO’s, NSCB’s, BAS’s and BLES’s ends to Section 28 and the September 12, 2013 approval — the bookkeeping this wiki’s Bureau of Agricultural Statistics entry performs for the DA lineage. (LawPhil — RA 10625)

3. Working with Civil Registry Documents

The PSA’s civil-registration mandate traces to Section 6(e) — “Carry out, enforce and administer civil registration functions in the country as provided for in Act No. 3753” — with the National Statistician as Civil Registrar General. (LawPhil — RA 10625, Wikipedia — PSA)

Strategies

Consolidate instead of coordinate: the Act replaced EO 121’s board-coordination model — four agencies across departments — with one authority holding censuses, sectoral statistics, and civil registration. (Wikipedia — PSA)
Attach to the planning agency: NEDA attachment “for purposes of policy coordination” ties the statistical program to the development-planning cycle without making the PSA a line-department agency. (LawPhil — RA 10625)
Govern by board: the Board’s mix — departments, the central bank, the research institute, local-government and private seats — institutionalizes consultation while reserving the chair to NEDA and the vice chair to the budget ministry. (LawPhil — RA 10625)
Plan the system on paper: the PSDP makes the decentralized system legible — every agency’s statistical activity enumerated and approved against one program. (LawPhil — RA 10625)

Security and Safety Measures

Confidentiality of individual returns: the Act sets confidentiality rules for survey data with penalties for violation — imprisonment of one year and a ₱100,000 fine — the enforcement teeth behind respondents’ answers. (Official Gazette — RA 10625)
One official series: PSA data as “the official and controlling statistics of the government” forecloses rival government counts. (LawPhil — RA 10625)
Whole transfer at abolition: Section 28’s movement of appropriations, records, properties, and personnel kept the abolished agencies’ data assets inside the system — continuity by statute. (LawPhil — RA 10625)
Professional headship: the National Statistician, holding Undersecretary rank, heads the PSA and doubles as Civil Registrar General — one accountable officer for the system’s outputs. (Wikipedia — PSA)
For researchers: cite the Act by section — creation (5), functions (6), Board (7), abolitions (28), effectivity (35) — and date agency ends to September 12, 2013. (LawPhil — RA 10625)

Historical Context

The Act closed a system designed in the first Aquino restoration. EO 121 of 1987 had rebuilt the post-Marcos machinery — renaming the National Census and Statistics Office the NSO and creating the NSCB — while sectoral statistics stayed with departmental bureaus such as the BAS of EO 116 and the BLES of EO 126; the deeper ancestry runs to Commonwealth Act No. 591 of 1940, which created the Bureau of the Census and Statistics that became the NSO, and to the census legislation of 1902 this wiki’s Census of Agriculture entry traces. (Wikipedia — PSA)

RA 10625 was approved September 12, 2013, effective upon approval. The first National Statistician, Lisa Grace Bersales, served 2014–2019 and was succeeded by Dennis Mapa; the PSA then conducted the 2015 and 2020 population censuses and the 2022 Census of Agriculture and Fisheries — the first agricultural census under the single-authority design — while the PSRTI took the system’s research arm, completing the architecture: one authority, one board, one institute, one program. (Wikipedia — PSA, Official Gazette — RA 10625)

Challenges and Controversies

Which Four Agencies

Casual summaries garble the merger list — crediting the Act with absorbing a “Bureau of the Census and Statistics.” The statute is categorical: the PSA was constituted from the NSO, the NSCB Technical Staff, the BAS, and the BLES (Sec. 5), and Section 28 abolishes the NSO, BAS, BLES, and NSCB — the Bureau of the Census and Statistics having been the NSO’s pre-1974 name, not a 2013 casualty. (LawPhil — RA 10625, Wikipedia — PSA)

Data Continuity Across the Merger

The abolished agencies’ series had to survive their producers’ legal death; Section 28’s transfer clause is the statutory bridge, tested by the 2012-to-2022 census comparison this wiki’s Census of Agriculture entry documents. (LawPhil — RA 10625)

Coordination Versus Independence

The Act declares the system’s “independence, objectivity and integrity” as policy while attaching the PSA to NEDA and chairing its Board with the NEDA Director-General — read by defenders as planning integration and by critics as subordination to the planning agenda, the standing debate of the Act’s first decade. (LawPhil — RA 10625)

The Third Reorganization

Each Philippine statistical design has been declared final — the 1987 EO 121 framework as much as the Act that repealed it — so students of the system read RA 10625 as the latest consolidation, judged by whether the series it inherited emerge unbroken. (Official Gazette — RA 10625)