CoA says Cebu City could have earned P848M more in real estate taxes
THE CEBU City government could have collected an additional income of P848.7 million as of May last year from real property tax if it had a better collection system for delinquents, the Commission on Audit said in a Feb. 2019 report. “We recommend that the City Treasurer’s Office monitor and intensify collection of the delinquent real property taxes (RPT). Likewise, request the assistance of the barangays where real property units are situated for the immediate release of demand letters and collection thereof,” reads the CoA Audit Observation Memorandum (AOM) dated Feb. 19. The AOM also noted that there was no RPT/Special Education Tax (SET) receivable set up for 2018. In her response, Acting City Treasurer Arlene Rentuza said the office has implemented several strategies to intensify its collection of the delinquent RPT, one of which is the hiring of job order employees to continuously deliver and serve notice of delinquencies. “We have fully implemented for the year 2018 the Amnesty on Real Property to give our taxpayers the chance to settle their delinquencies,” she said. Ms. Rentuza also said that they are in the process of generating the list of delinquent real properties and work with barangay officials in communicating to the property owners. “We are also on the stage of migrating our real property taxes to the new RPT system that has an updated feature such as allowing the office of the treasurer to easily generate list of real property status of every property,” she added. At least 41 locations in Cebu City have unpaid RPTs, based on the CoA report.