STATEMENT OF SEC. SONNY COLOMA MALACAÑANG PRESS BRIEFING 4 March 2014 ON THE BIR CAMPAIGN In his 2011 Statement of the Nation Address, the President has called upon all citizens including self-employed professionals to pay the correct amount of taxes. We quote the English translation, “...I wish we could say that we had completely eliminated the wang-wang attitude, but in some parts of our consciousness, it still persists. It still exists in the private sector. According to the BIR, we have around 1.7 million self-employed and professional taxpayers: lawyers, doctors, businessmen who paid a total of 9.8 billion pesos in 2010. This means that each of them paid only an average of 5,783 pesos in income tax—and if this is true, then they each must have earned only 8,500 pesos a month, which is below the minimum wage. I find this hard to believe. Today we can see that our taxes are going where they should, and therefore there is no reason not to pay the proper taxes. I say to you: it’s not just the government, but our fellow citizens, who are cheated out of the benefits that these taxes would have provided...” Taxes are the lifeblood of the economy. In accordance with the PDP goals, the BIR’s campaign is to intensify efforts to increase the country’s tax-to-GDP ratio to 16 to 18 percent by 2016. As of 2013, the country’s tax-to-GDP ratio reached 13.6 percent, but still below the 17 percent recorded prior to the Asian financial crisis. The government is committed to strengthening its tax collection efforts and make its tax-to-GDP ratio at par with its ASEAN counterparts. According to a World Bank report, the tax effort of Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore stands at 17.6 percent, 16.1 percent and 13.8 percent respectively. We call on all professional organizations to urge their members to pay the right taxes and help in the country’s overall economic development efforts.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 00:30:07 +0000
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