The Y2K Commission submitted to President Estrada its first status report on the country's Y2K readiness on Dec. 20, 1998. Monthly reports will follow.

The commission conducted a survey of about 266 Philippine companies, organizations and government bodies to determine their Y2K readiness. This became the basis of the Commission's first status report.

The commission decided to limit the survey to seven mission-critical sectors. Only big players from each sector were included. These constituted the 266 respondents.

The respondents were asked to rate their Y2K readiness based on five phases: 1) Awareness, 2) assessment, 3) remediation, 4) testing and 5) implementation.

The respondents were asked to test their systems using the Y2K Toolkit provided by the World Bank.

Based on the results of the survey, the commission announced the following percentage of readiness of the seven mission-critical sectors it identified: Utility sector, 64 percent; telecom, 52 percent; transportation, 51 percent; finance, 72 percent; health care, 66 percent; manufacturing, 71 percent; and government, 35 percent.

Issues which arose from the commission's findings included the fact that there were only 266 respondents, raising the question that the respondents may not be representative of the sectors they belong to and that the survey itself is not nationwide in nature.

The commission, however, said that it chose only the big companies or organizations in what they deemed as the seven mission-critical sectors. The numbers were small, though. For example, for the health care sector, only 54 hospitals were included in the survey, and all 54 are government-run (under the DOH). For the telecom sector, only PLDT, BayanTel and Globe were mentioned. The problem here is that even though the big players attain Y2K readiness by Dec. 31, they will inevitably have to perform transactions with the smaller players one way or another. These small players which were not included in the survey may not be Y2K-ready. This is expecially true with banks, which will have to continue performing transactions with each other come Jan. 1, 2000.

Another issue which arose concerned the validity of the survey itself. Members of the Y2K Commission were not physically present when the respondents performed their Y2K assessment. The commission admitted that it cannot be 100-percent sure of the validity of the responses given them. Moreover, the respondents were assured that they would not be held criminally liable for the answers and results they place in the survey. "We will have to rely on their word about the validity of their reports," said Y2K Commission chair Amable Aguiluz.

A list of Y2K-compliant companies will be released by the commission soon.