Short answer. After approving your petition, the local civil registrar (or consul general) must, within five working days, transmit a copy of the decision together with the records of the proceedings to the Office of the Civil Registrar General. Your correction is not finished at the local counter — it moves up for central-level action.
What the law says
He shall transmit a copy of his decision together with the records of the proceedings to the Office of the Civil Registrar General within five (5) working days from the date of the decision.
RA 9048, Section 6 — Posting Decision And Transmittal. Read the full provision →
Before the decision: examination and posting
The approval sits at the end of a short, defined sequence. When you file, the civil registrar (or, abroad, the consul general) first examines the petition and its supporting documents. If they are found sufficient in form and substance, the registrar must post the petition in a conspicuous place provided for that purpose for ten (10) consecutive days. The posting is a public step: it gives anyone who might object a window to be heard before the entry in your record is changed. Only after the posting — and, for a change of first name, the newspaper publication — has run its course does the registrar move to decide. So approval is never instant; the waiting period is built into the law itself.
The decision deadline
The law then puts the registrar on a clock. He must act on the petition and shall render a decision not later than five (5) working days after the completion of the posting and/or publication requirement. That decision is the approval, or the denial, itself. The five-working-day limit is meant to stop a properly documented petition from stalling indefinitely on someone's desk once the public-notice period is over. It does not, however, mean every petition is granted — the registrar still weighs whether your documents actually support the correction. A decision within the period can just as easily be a denial if the proof falls short of what the law demands.
Transmittal to the Civil Registrar General
Approval at the local level is not the last word. The section requires the registrar to transmit a copy of his decision together with the records of the proceedings to the Office of the Civil Registrar General within five (5) working days from the date of the decision. In other words, the file leaves the local office and goes up to the central authority that oversees civil registration nationwide. This transmittal is what carries your approved correction into the wider system, rather than leaving it as a purely local act. Until that central-level stage runs its course, it is prudent not to treat the correction as fully and finally settled everywhere.
What this step does not do
This provision describes the registrar's duties; it does not, on its own, hand you a freshly corrected certificate the moment approval is signed. The transmittal to the central office exists precisely because a further review and the actual annotation of your record follow, and copies you request too early may still show the old entry. The section also does not create a right to a particular result, set any fee, or promise how long the central-level handling takes in practice. If your petition is denied, or if an approved correction is not reflected in the records you later obtain, those are situations worth raising with counsel rather than simply re-filing on your own.