Lawmakers hit attempts to hide BOC shortfall

MANILA, Philippines - Opposition lawmakers hit yesterday the attempts of the Aquino administration to cover up its dismal performance in generating revenues since 2010 by disregarding laws meant to ensure strict collections of revenue generating agencies.

House Minority Leader Danilo Suarez and Zambales Rep. Milagros Magsaysay cited the recent move of Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima to suspend the implementation of the Lateral Attrition Law, which penalizes officials of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) and the Bureau of Customs (BOC) for poor collection performance.

According to these lawmakers, Malacañang refused to reduce or remove, even temporarily, the value added tax (VAT) on oil, and that the BIR and BOC “have not been meeting virtually any of their monthly collection targets.”

Magsaysay said that the BOC posted a P4-billion shortfall for January alone “so if that has been the trend in the past several months, this administration has been relying only on the VAT, which in the end punishes the Filipino people.”

“In other words, the ‘deficit improvement’ that the administration likes to boast of is being achieved for the benefit of our creditors, but at great cost to the long-term welfare of our people,” Suarez said.

“These are incontrovertible facts. All the statistics are available to support this, not only from the mass media, but also from government publications and websites. Since the Minority have a duty to fiscalize the party in power, we have called for the appropriate investigation of the performance shortfalls of the above and other government agencies,” he said.

Magsaysay hit Malacañang’s justification in suspending the law that it was “uncomfortable” with the way the revenue targets for BIR and BOC are currently being established and monitored.

“The actual suspension of the law is not allowed under the provisions of that same law just because the administration has not been able to meet its revenue collection targets,” she said.

“The disregard that they have for the law whenever it becomes too difficult to comply with is no different from the recklessness with which they provoked the instigation of an impeachment trial,” she added.

She said the administration was trying to squelch appeals to suspend the imposition of VAT on oil on the grounds that the proceeds from the tax is used for the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program.

“We all know that the CCT is funded by a loan from the Asian Development Bank. So how can they say now that we should hinge the collections of VAT to pay the CCT?” Magsaysay said.

She also pointed out that under the Aquino administration, tax leakages have reached P200 billion annually.

“If only this administration will plug the loopholes in the collection in the BIR and BOC, then they will have the leeway to relax the collection of the VAT,” Magsaysay said.

Suarez likewise recalled that nothing ever came out of the government investigation into the missing 2,000 containers from the BOC, which reportedly led to billions of tax losses.