Blue Ribbon panel to seek quarterly BIR, Customs progress reports

THE Senate committee on accountability of public officers and investigations ( also known as Blue Ribbon) plans to summon the Bureau of Customs ( BoC) and the Bureau of Internal Revenue ( BIR) for quarterly sessions to monitor their collection of taxes.

“I would like to call a Blue Ribbon Committee meeting every quarter as oversight for accountability of public officials together with Loren Legarda’s finance committee so we can guard carefully the collections of Customs and BIR,” Committee Chairman Senator Richard J. Gordon said Tuesday, during a Senate investigation on the alleged corruption at the BoC.

Mr. Gordon presented documents revealing the extent of uncollected duties and value- added taxes ( VAT) that the agencies failed to raise from imports.

“It’s a tsunami of leakage of taxes, of smuggled goods,” he said, citing a 2017 study by the University of Asia and the Pacific which estimated that P905 billion was foregone from 2011 to 2015 due to smuggling and VAT leakage.

He added that another P423 billion was uncollected from imports from China from 2012 to 2016. This included duties and VAT uncollected by the BoC based on his computations from Chinese and Philippine official data on the Mainland’s exports to the Philippines.

Mr. Gordon also alleged that several consignees or importers appeared to pay minimal duties to the BIR relative to the volume of goods being imported.

One company allegedly paid only P15,629 to the BIR despite having imported P833 million worth of goods over years. Another company allegedly imported P684 million worth of goods over five years but only paid P62,597 worth of taxes.

Mr. Gordon said the quarterly meeting will generate progress reports from the BoC and BIR, specifically on their response to the allegations of undercollection.

“We need to monitor this every quarter and that’s what I intend to do,” he told reporters.

Customs commissioner Isidro S. Lapeña has agreed to the quarterly sessions, and added that the agency will meet with the BIR to improve the collection of taxes.

“We will meet with BIR and we will ensure that what is due to government should be given to government,” he said.