Bazaars to help lower tax shortfall: BIR
abs-cbnNEWS.com | 11/05/2009 5:48 PM
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MANILA - The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) is hoping to get more taxes from bazaars that sprout during the holiday season as it scrambles to minimize the shortfall in tax collection, if not meet the country's full-year collection target.
Joel Tan-Torres, the bureau's newly-appointed officer-in-charge, said the BIR's "Operation SanTAX Claus" will help them collect "a significant amount of collection" this year.
However, he did not cite specific figures. "It's hard to quantify because there are too many bazaars operating underground. We could not estimate how much," Tan-Torres told ABS-CBN's "Umagang Kay Ganda" on Thursday.
"Operation San-TAX Claus," one of Tan-Torres' initiatives, aims to monitor Christmas bazaars and make sure that they pay the right taxes and issue receipts to customers. Another one of Tan-Torres' other programs is a 5% withholding tax on campaign expenditures.
The BIR is targeting to collect P798.46 billion for the year, but Tan-Torres said the amount would be difficult to achieve especially with the effects of back-to-back typhoons and the passage of several "revenue-eroding" measures.
Latest data from the Department of Finance, which oversees the BIR, showed that the agency's tax collection amounted to P557 billion for the first 9 months of the year, lower than the 9-month official target of P596.2 billion and the P587.9 billion collected in the same period last year.
At present, taxes collected by the BIR account for three-fourths of the government's total tax revenues.
The BIR's poor collection has bloated the country's budget deficit, which is widely seen to exceed the P250-billion ceiling for 2009.
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