DOF to work closely with BIR to help alleviate poverty

The Department of Finance (DOF) will work closely with the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) to ensure the financial sustainability of the present administration's ambitious program in sustaining economic growth at the same time ramping up efforts to alleviate poverty.

In a statement, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III has vowed to work with BIR as it takes on the task of bringing poor and underprivileged Filipinos to the economic mainstream.

Dominguez said that being in the business of raising revenues, the BIR is working “under extraordinary circumstances” at the front line of the new government’s broad effort to reverse the pattern of slow and exclusive growth and meet the challenge of freeing six million Filipinos from poverty on the Duterte watch.

“I look forward to closer collaboration with you [BIR officials] in the coming period. Together, we will do what has to be done. We will undertake the reforms and improve on tax administration. We will do this together. Our people expect us to succeed. We will not fail them,” Dominguez said at the Fourth Quarter Revenue Command Conference held at the BIR Head Office in Quezon City.

He noted that the GDP expanded by 7.1 percent in the last quarter — making the Philippines the fastest growing economy in Asia in that period — and for the government to sustain this momentum in the medium term at the very least, the BIR will have to help raise enough revenues for investments to transform the economy from a consumption-led into an investment-driven one.

This will entail, he said, massive public investments in infrastructure to pull down production costs to match those of the Philippines’ more competitive Asian neighbors.

Dominguez said this task will require the BIR to help earn the needed revenues for the higher spending strategy even as it embarks on the equally challenging job of carrying out a comprehensive tax reform program anchored on bringing down the income tax rates for individuals and corporations to the regional average.