"What people don't understand is that the breakdown of the Php350 fee is not only for the stickers alone. It's a lot bigger than that. It will pay for stickers, the readers, hardware, software, maintenance, services and others. So if you reduce the costs, what remains is Php240, the Php110 or more than Php90 goes to the government (treasury, VAT, LTO IT training fund, capacity building, etc.). And the net income of Stradcom per tag is only about Php14 or Php15," he says.

Dizon says the total investment on the RFID project is pegged around Php1.2 billion, or Php240 multiplied by the five million registered vehicles in the country. The Philippine has about 10 million licensed drivers.

Another misconception, Dizon cites, is that LTO doesn't need any license to implement the RFID system. It simply needs an approval from the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) for the RFID devices.

Dizon says they are confident that LTO will soon secure a permit from the NTC since the devices' radio frequency is only around the 918, 920 megahertz band. The devices will come from Stradcom's provider Free2move, a Swedish firm and one of the leading providers of RFID system in the world.

Included in the Php350 tag, he says, is the IT security at LTO's database. With five million vehicles registered and 10 million driver's licenses, Dizon reveals the LTO experiences about 100 hacking attempts per day since 2002. However, all attempts have been unsuccessful. "The RFID system is linked to the LTO database. And it has redundant security."