Ahfat closed
3 restaurants owe P31 - million in taxes
OPLAN Kandado of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR)-Davao padlocked three branches of a popular Chinese restaurant yesterday afternoon for tax delinquency.
Rodrigo Lizada Rivamonte, Revenue District Officer, in a press conference yesterday said that they found basis to close Ahfat Seafood Restaurants 1, 2, and 3 after its owner has incurred P31 million total value added tax (VAT) liability for 2015-2017.
“We conduct Oplan Kandado if there is 30% under-declaration. There are three other ways to close the establishments: first, the lack of registration; second, is the nonissuance of receipts and invoices, and the third
one, is misdeclaration. We have been here in the past ten days and we have conducted covert surveillance wherein we have tried to monitor their daily sales and apparently it failed to comply with the 30 percent under-declaration,” he said.
He said that for 2017, there was a 64-percent under declaration, 67 percent under-declaration for 2016, and 64 percent under-declaration for the year 2015.
The 1997 Tax Code of the Philippines provides that under-declaration of sales, receipts or income in an amount exceeding 30 percent of that declared per return, and overstatement of the deductions claimed by an amount exceeding 30 percent is already construed as substantial and is thus a prima facie case of a false or fraudulent return.
“Roughly there is a total of P17.5 million under-declared basic taxes, and P31-million underdeclared taxes for the three-year period,” he said.
He said that owners of the establishment failed to declare P63 million in the year 2015, P74 million in 2016, and P17 million in the first quarter of 2017.
He said that P31 million tax deficiency is from around P13 million for the year 2015, P14.2 million for the year 2016 and P 3.2 million for the first quarter of 2017.
Rivamonte said that for the restaurant to be re-opened the owners can pay the total assessed value. Or it can pay 110 percent of basic tax