Avoid appointing crooks to Customs, Marcos urged

MANILA, Philippines — President-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr. should avoid appointing unscrupulous officials to the graft-ridden Bureau of Customs if he is serious in plugging the leakages in the government’s revenue collection, according to a congressman.

“Please don’t bring garbage anymore in Customs. Let’s listen to the people, let’s clean up our very own backyard. Let’s take the garbage out. Let us not allow garbage to gain entry into our bureaucracy,” Northern Samar Rep. Paul Daza said in a privilege speech.

He also made the same call to incoming finance secretary Benjamin Diokno, who will be leaving his post as governor of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, since the BOC is directly under the Department of Finance.

“We cannot expect to achieve our revenue targets if the people in our revenue-generating agencies are garbage,” he said, urging the incoming administration to hire the “best and the brightest in government.”

“Let the historic win of president-elect Marcos and VP-elect Sara Duterte be another important point in our history as a nation where we, under One Flag, can improve revenue collection by ridding our bureaucracy of misfits and scalawags,” Daza stressed.

As far as he is concerned, “good governance begins with choosing the best and the brightest – and this includes choosing the right ones for critical agencies such as the Bureau of Customs.”

“We must be wary of certain personalities and groups that may have plans to hostage the chances of our country,” the senior administration lawmaker from the Visayas said, insisting there should be “cleansing.”

“Certainly, it will not be easy – there will be bumps along the way – but with a robust planning, revenue generation, budgeting, spending, and a united front between the legislative and executive branches, the economy is bound to recover and take off,” Daza said.

In calling for internal cleansing in some of the government’s agencies, he highlighted the growth projection of Asian Development Bank of 6.0 percent in 2022, with the potential to rise further to 6.3 percent in 2023.

Daza also stressed that the employment rate is stabilizing with an estimated rate of 93.6 percent in February this year, up from 91.2 in February 2021. The government also estimated a net employment of 2.9 million above pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2022.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri said he met with Marcos who expressed his view on addressing leakages in tax collections instead of increasing taxes during the early stage of his administration.

Zubiri, who is poised to be Senate president in the 19th Congress, said Marcos wanted to ensure that leakages in tax collections should be addressed.

He pointed to the Bureau of Internal Revenue and Bureau of Customs as possible sources of tax leakages.

“We have pinpointed BOC, BIR. That’s why Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian’s job is very important on how we can help through legislation to plug leakages,” Zubiri said, referring to Gatchalian’s chairmanship of the Senate committee on ways and means, which has jurisdiction over all taxation, tariffs and other revenue-raising measures in the 19th Congress. – With Cecille Suerte Felipe

Earlier, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III recommended a need to increase taxes to allow the government to pay its debt that ballooned during the COVID-19 pandemic that hit the country in 2020.