"What exactly does this plan provide?"
Finally, Congress has passed the long-awaited and much needed tax incentives reform plan. It took years of hearings and back-and-forth among various interest groups before this plan now known as the Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentives for Enterprises Act (C.R.E.A.T.E.) could pass muster.
Perhaps, if not for this pandemic, this plan would have been tossed around yet again just like its fate in the previous administration which at first blush seemed to favor a real overhaul of the country's incentives program only to succumb to the pressures of businesses competing for their own part of the incentives pie. Thanks in large part to the dogged determination of this administration and its allies in Congress, we now have a more balanced and targeted incentives program which, hopefully, is attractive enough to attract investors, local and foreign, to set shop in the country.
What exactly does this plan provide? For starters, it lowers income taxes from 30 percent, the highest in all of ASEAN, to 20 percent for domestic corporations with total assets not exceeding P100 million (excluding land) and total net taxable income not exceeding P5 million – essentially MSMEs – and 25 percent for other corporations. That puts us at par with most of our neighbors in ASEAN although we would have preferred an even lower rate to put us ahead of the pack. But, as our economic managers and our friends in Congress said, we should give ourselves time to reconcile the shaving of government's revenues from the old rates with the promised expansion of the tax base as businesses expand or new ones come in.
Additionally, it provides incentives for enterprises relocating outside of the NCR and those that will locate to areas recovering from disasters or armed conflict. Then, there is the one percent tax rate for proprietary educational institutions and hospitals which are non profit for three years effective July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2023. Also, there is lower percentage tax from 3 percent to one percent for small businesses whose gross sales or receipts do not exceed the VAT exempt threshold of P3Million and lowered minimum income tax from 2 percent to one percent for the same period.
Then, there are incentives directed at enhancing health and anti COVID-19 measures such as VAT-free sale and importation of COVID-19 drugs, vaccines, medical devices and PPE components until December 2023; VAT exemptions for medicines for cancer, mental illnesses, tuberculosis and kidney diseases and reduced preferential tax rates from 10 percent to one percent for non profit hospitals and educational institutions for three years up to June 2023.
Finally, there are a number of reforms in the value added tax (VAT) regime which, unfortunately, some quarters are urging the President to veto. These include, notably, the exemption from payment of taxes and duties on certain imports of domestic oil refineries which was meant as an incentive for Petron, the only remaining refinery in the country, to maintain its facility in the face of the single VAT on the refined oil product imports of the other distributors such as Shell and Caltex, both of which have stopped refining crude oil resorting instead to just importing refined products. Why some quarters are objecting to this remains a mystery, especially since we are all aware that we have to be as secure as ever in the continuous supply of all kinds of oil products as a key plank of our moving forward and leveling up, especially under emergencies such as this pandemic.
Some critics have also bewailed the higher VAT exemption threshold for socialized and low-cost housing, as if we did not have such a huge gap in the delivery of much needed housing stocks to those who continue to stay in dilapidated quarters in congested communities. The argument that "poor households do not benefit from increased VAT exemptions" is as baseless and callous as all the other concerns of bleeding hearts who decry such fractions of incentives to those who are truly in need but remain silent about those being whipped up by the denizens of such public utilities as power, water, telecoms and even transport systems who continue to haul in billions of pesos of gravy under various guises within the existing unreconstructed tax incentive regime.
Now, that harangue about the "exemption from review" by the Fiscal Incentives Review Board (FIRB) and even by the President of any tax incentives granted under legislative franchises may be worth looking into. If the same can be shown as excessive, then the franchises can be subject to cancellation or amendment as the case may be. But to have these subjected to review at any given time by an executive unit degrades such issuances and opens grantees to undue pressure as they roll out their services or products as provided for in their franchises. There are remedies to abuse other than having a sword over their head even before they can start using their franchises to provide what we should grant as necessary services or products for the public good.
