The Finance Department said Monday it will review the tax exemptions enjoyed by companies amounting to P144 billion annually.
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said in a statement the agency would review the incentive program that was costing the government billions of pesos in foregone revenues.
“This administration is committed to rationalizing tax incentives,” Dominguez said.
“Government provides at least P144 billion in income tax perks and tax holidays. A truly serious study needs to be done about the relevance of many of those tax perks,” he said.
The Finance Department said aside from the tax perks review, it was teaming up with the Justice Department to expedite the implementation of 635 smuggling and tax cases involving about P103 billion in lost revenues.
“We will work closely with the DoJ to speed up resolution of 635 pending tax and smuggling cases, amounting to P103 billion in collectibles,” Dominguez said.
“It will be a sad commentary on our state of affairs if Rate and Rats [campaigns] have resulted in only five convictions for tax evasion and two convictions for smuggling,” he said, in reference to the BIR’s Run Against Tax Evaders program and the BoC’s Run After The Smugglers program.
Dominguez said the new government would raise public spending on human and physical capital so it could “deliver a bigger bang per buck” in line with President Rodrigo Duterte’s electoral mandate to bring progress to all Filipinos amid the country’s resurgent economy.
He said to generate enough funds for priority programs, the Finance Department would overhaul the collection systems at the Bureau of Internal Revenue and Bureau of Customs and work to eliminate misconduct in these two agencies.
Dominguez appointed Finance undersecretary and chief economist Gil Beltran as the “anti-red tape czar.” Beltran will be in charge speeding up processes at the Finance Department, BIR, BOC and other attached agencies to comply with Duterte’s first directive for all government offices to provide hassle-free frontline services to the public.
“I will be appointing shortly undersecretary Gil Beltran to be the ‘anti-red tape czar’,” Dominguez said of Beltran, who is the undersecretary for policy development management.
“His [Beltran] role will be to dramatically reduce the number of steps and documentary requirements in transacting business with the DOF and all attached bureaus,” Dominguez said.
Beltran welcomed his new position and said that from an average of 10 days and five days of processing time for complicated documents and regular requests, he would try to cut it down by half by January 2017.
“The faster you do things, the more work needs to be done, the number of transactions also increases because you are serving more. You don’t usually cut down the number of personnel,” Beltran said.