The Finance Department wants to adjust the income tax holidays in the country to be at par with those of other Southeast Asian countries in a bid to modernize the incentives program and further liberalize the economy.
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said the government needed to rationalize the current fiscal incentives program while working on ways to make the Philippines a more open economy for foreign direct investments.
Dominguez said he asked Finance undersecretary Karl Kendrick Chua to compare the country’s set of tax breaks with those of the other Asean members.
“We are currently doing a line-by-line comparison between ourselves and our competitors in Asean. Karl Chua is doing this together with some members of our staff, so that we can really compare apples to apples,” Dominguez said.
He said the was not rushing the preparation of a fiscal incentives rationalization bill “because we want time to consult, to really think and check what’s going on around the Asean region.”