House to initiate dialogues for Duterte’s priority bills

MANILA, Philippines —  The House of Representatives will initiate regular meetings with senators and Cabinet officials to speed up the approval of the Duterte administration’s priority legislative measures, Deputy Speaker Luis Raymund Villafuerte said yesterday.

These dialogues, he added, would be held ahead of the planned meeting of the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council (Ledac).

Among the measures the House leadership would work on getting passed this year are the remaining bills under the comprehensive tax reform package (CTRP), which President Duterte endorsed in his latest State of the Nation Address. 
“The direction of Speaker (Alan Peter) Cayetano is to really have regular meetings with the Cabinet economic cluster, but importantly, with the Senate,” Villafuerte said, adding that the House leadership briefly discussed the envisioned dialogues with Senate President Vicente Sotto III on the sidelines of Monday’s SONA. 

He also said that the CTRP components the House aims to approve this year include those that seek to reduce income tax, overhaul the fiscal incentives system, increase alcohol tax, revise local government property valuations and grant a general tax amnesty that allows the lifting of bank secrecy in fraud cases.

“I am confident that under the leadership of Speaker Cayetano, the House would be able to hit the ground running and act in timely fashion on the priority measures that President Duterte wants done so as not to – in his own words – ‘squander our future’,” he added.

Villafuerte reiterated that the House would avoid the three-month delay in the enactment of the national budget by the last Congress by approving the proposed 2020 outlay before the end of this year.            

Earlier, Majority Leader Martin Romualdez vowed to fast track the approval of the administration’s priority measures as enumerated by Duterte last Monday.

Meanwhile, Albay Rep. Joey Salceda, newly elected chairman of the House of Representatives ways and means committee, vowed yesterday to create more than one million jobs with the approval of a bill that will substantially cut corporate income tax.            

“It’s time to do the work needed to make the Philippines more competitive in encouraging domestic investments and in attracting foreign investors to create business opportunities, generate jobs and increase incomes,” Salceda said.

“We do this by reducing corporate income tax from 30 percent to 20 percent by 2029, or two percent every two years. We project this measure to generate 1.4 million new jobs from domestic enterprises during the period,” he pointed out.

The proposed reduction is contained in the Tax Reform for Attracting Better and Higher-quality Opportunities or TRABAHO bill, which he has re-filed. In the last Congress, the House approved the measure but the Senate sat on it. The measure, which also seeks to rationalize fiscal incentives to corporations, was renamed CITRA or the Corporate Income Tax and Incentive Reform Act by the Department of Finance.

Rep. Mikee Romero of party-list group 1-Pacman also said yesterday that he would file his version of the TRABAHO bill and the proposed law that would increase excise taxes on alcohol products as he agreed with Salceda that the reduction in corporate income tax “could lead to more job opportunities and income for our people.”

“The substantial reduction would mean that businesses would have more investible income they could use for expansion or for starting new ventures. That, in turn, would mean more jobs,” he said.            

To speed up the process, Salceda said: “We will invoke a section in the House rules providing that a committee could hold only one meeting or hearing on a bill approved by the chamber in the past Congress.”