[Vantage Point] Why gov’t should slow down on the BI-Securiport P192-billion revenue deal

The Bureau of Immigration plans to implement a 20-year border-security deal funded by a $4 fee on international travelers, projected to generate P192 billion, despite existing investments in biometric technology. Concerns have been raised about the transparency of the project, including the financial model, cost adjustments, and potential duplication of existing systems already funded by the government and private entities. Congress is investigating the implications of the fee, questioning the separation of aviation security costs from broader national security functions, and emphasizing the need for clarity on what travelers are actually paying for. This is AI-generated. Read the article for full context. Report any errors. The Bureau of Immigration (BI) wants travelers to finance a 20-year border-security deal projected to generate P192 billion, even as the government and the New NAIA Infra Corp. (NNIC) are already spending billions on biometric and immigration technology. Before signing with Securiport, government should show passengers exactly what they are paying for—and why. I find something fundamentally odd about the government’s plan to charge international travelers another $4 every time they enter or leave the Philippines. Four dollars may look harmless. But an ordinary round trip means $8, or roughly P500. Multiply that by millions of passenger movements and this becomes a multibillion-peso revenue stream financed by travelers. And the deeper I looked into the proposed Civil Aviation and Immigration Security Services project, or CAISS, the more red flags I found. Screenshot from List of PPP projects in the pipeline as of June 3, 2024, ppp.gov.ph Appearing before the House on August 24 (watch video below), Immigration Commissioner Joel Anthony Viado (starts from around 1:04:36) defended the project. He said US-based Securiport LLC would finance the P10.744-billion project, upgrade the technology every four years and train Immigration personnel. Government, in other words, would not initially write the check. Viado said CAISS could generate P192 billion over its 20-year life. Under the basic $4 user fee, Securiport gets $3.80, or 95%, while BI gets $0.20, or 5%, plus an additional premium once annual passenger volume exceeds 50 million. But even $4 is not necessarily the ceiling. BI’s tender documents obtained by Vantage Point call it a reference user fee that may be adjusted for inflation, material foreign-exchange movements or expansion of project scope. The adjustment mechanics are contained in the still-undisclosed Public-Private Partnership (PPP) agreement. So does P192 billion already include those escalators? What passenger growth does it assume? How much will Securiport invest as equity and how much might it borrow? The answers should exist. BI’s tender requires financial projections through 2046 covering revenues, operating expenses, borrowings, debt repayments, equity contributions, payments to shareholders, project IRR, equity IRR and weighted average cost of capital. There is a financial model behind this deal. Passengers simply have not seen it. Even the project cost has moved dramatically. PPP Center records carried CAISS at P16.89 billion in March 2025. It then fell to P12.86 billion and eventually to the P10.744 billion approved by the Department of Justice in December—a reduction of P6.15 billion, or 36%. Lower cost may reflect successful negotiation. But what changed? Scope? Equipment? Prices? Financing assumptions? And if project cost fell that much, how was the $4 fee recalibrated? Then there is what government already has. Since September 2024, New NAIA Infra Corp., the San Miguel-led consortium, has operated and modernized NAIA. As of August 15, NNIC had already remitted P78 billion to government while spending another P6.8 billion on rehabilitation and modernization. NNIC funded 78 biometric Immigration e-gates at NAIA and deployed 517 other biometric-enabled passenger-processing units, although these are not all immigration systems. BI itself already operates the UN-supported goTravel Advance Passenger Information System, which screens travelers against international watchlists before arrival. In July, that system detected an INTERPOL-listed passenger more than nine hours before his flight reached NAIA. BI is also implementing a government-funded biometric modernization program incorporating an Automated Biometric Identification System and border-data exchange platform. In August, Viado separately awarded another P219-million government-funded project for advanced facial recognition and monitoring. Does this sound duplication to you? Indeed, CAISS is considerably more ambitious, encompassing API/PNR (Advance Passenger Information/Passenger Name Record) processing, risk targeting, international databases, and advanced facial searches. But that makes disclosure more important. What stays? What gets integrated? What gets migrated or replaced? And what exactly does Securiport provide that government and NNIC have not already paid for? BI’s own Strategy 2026–2040 raises another question. It identifies continuing border-modernization requirements and says the Immigration Trust Fund can finance licenses, hardware refreshes, biometric and risk-model updates, cybersecurity, and even AI-assisted risk analytics. Why commit travelers to a private fee for 20 years before explaining why BI’s own modernization and funding mechanisms cannot provide some of the same capabilities? International experience gives me another reason for caution. In July, Sierra Leone suspended the $25 passenger security fee attached to its Securiport arrangement while government reviews the contract and an independent special audit proceeds. The Gambia’s National Audit Office also scrutinized its Securiport arrangement and warned about termination costs associated with its long concession. This demonstrates why scrutiny must happen before, not after, a long-term passenger-funded agreement is signed. There is also a matter of principle. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) allows legitimate aviation-security costs to be recovered from users under appropriate conditions. But its charging policies distinguish those costs from broader state functions such as intelligence gathering and national security, which civil aviation should not be made to finance. CAISS expressly includes passenger intelligence, watchlist screening, and risk targeting. So which part of the $4 pays for chargeable aviation services and which finances sovereign national-security functions? Congress is asking similar questions. House Resolution 1064 seeks an investigation into the passenger fee, the “privatization of border security functions” and potential data-privacy and national-security risks. Viado says no formal PPP contract has been signed. As of September 2, the PPP Center still lists CAISS as under comparative challenge, and BI has posted no Notice of Award. Good. There is still time. Publish the financial model and show us the passenger assumptions, debt, equity, operating costs, shareholder returns and escalation formula. Reconcile the P16.89-billion, P12.86-billion and P10.744-billion project costs, and map CAISS against the border systems government and NNIC are already funding. Only then can government convincingly explain why passengers should finance the difference for the next 20 years. Government may call CAISS a no-cost project because private capital supplies the money upfront, but as Milton Friedman famously put it, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Someone always pays. At NAIA, government already has a private concessionaire investing billions in modernization while remitting P78 billion to the state. Before it reaches for another P500 from every international round-trip traveler—and potentially more as the reference fee escalates—it owes passengers a simple answer: What exactly are we buying that we have not already paid for? Privatization was supposed to take the burden off government. It was never supposed to keep putting that burden back on the passenger. – Rappler.com Below are some Vantage Point pieces you might have missed: Click here for other Vantage Point articles.