A legislator from the Bicol region on Sunday appealed anew to the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) to consider granting tax credits to supermarkets and other retail stores that are required to give discounts to seniors and disabled individuals.
Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte at the same time welcomed this month’s scheduled implementation of the higher discounts on essential grocery items purchased by senior citizens and persons with disabilities (PWDs).
Villafuerte pointed out that with many small supermarkets and retail outlets apparently struggling already with thin profit margins, “such a tax break would spell financial relief for them—and help ensure their greater compliance with this new House-initiated economic benefit for our seniors and PWDs in the face of the ever-spiralling cost of basic commodities,” Villafuerte said.
The most common complaint of retail establishments that are required to grant discounts to seniors and PWDs is the refusal of the BIR to give tax credits for the discounts.
The owner of a drug store said politicians who enact laws that grant discounts to seniors and PWDs succeed in looking good and possibly gaining the votes of those discount beneficiaries at the expense of retail shop owners, most of whom are struggling to survive.
“It does not cost them (politicians) anything to look good to seniors and PWDs. It is us (small businessmen) who suffer because of their (politicians’) effort to look good and earn votes,” the drug store owner said, as he complained that the BIR has set up “several roadblocks to prevent the tax credit from being given.”
Villafuerte, who authored various laws and House-passed measures providing economic benefits to the elderly and solo parents, renewed his appeal to BIR following last week’s release of the revised government rules on special discounts on purchases of basic necessities and price commodities (BNPCs) by seniors and PWDs by doubling to 5 percent the price cuts that supermarkets and other retail outlets are required to give to these sectors.
The new policy, which raises the current cap of P65 to P125 the price reduction that these priority groups can avail of weekly on their BNPC purchases, will mean that seniors and PWDs are entitled from hereon to get as much as P500 in discounts every month, Villafuerte said.
The 100-percent increase in the BNPC price cuts was embodied in a joint administrative order (JAO) signed last Mar. 21 by the Department of Trade and Industry with the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy.