• BIR to enlist 6K medium taxpayers

The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) said yesterday it is targeting to enlist 6,000 taxpayers into its Medium Taxpayers Segment, a newly developed system to strengthen the monitoring of its taxpayers in selected regions in the country.

In a statement, BIR assistant commissioner Marietta Lorenzo said the top 500 individual and corporate taxpayers of about 12 regional offices of the BIR would be enlisted in the Medium Taxpayers Segment of the BIR during its initial implementation.

“During its initial implementation, the project will cover the top 500 taxpayers of 12 identified regions, a total of 6,000 medium taxpayers,” Lorenzo said.

Lorenzo said the establishment of such system would help monitor and improve the compliance of the top taxpayers in the revenue regions of the BIR.

Under the program, Lorenzo said every regional office would also create teams which would analyze taxpayers compliance and recommend measures to be implemented by the concerned regional and district offices to improve their tax collections.

In a separate interview, BIR assistant commissioner Marissa Cabreros said medium taxpayers are estimated to comprise about 19 percent of the BIR’s total tax collections.

Cabreros said medium taxpayers are technically large taxpayers who cannot be accommodated by the Large Taxpayers Service at the national level.

“We are using the tax code definition of large taxpayer. But our LTS cannot handle all of this at the national office, so we will be utilizing the regions to monitor the other large taxpayers. But to distinguish them, we will call them the medium taxpayers,” Cabreros said.

She said the enhanced monitoring of this segment would help the BIR project its revenue, improve its tax collection, and therefore assist the government in its program.

“We will be able to monitor if the collection is enough and know what’s happening if the collections are down. At least we know who to focus on,” she said.

Earlier, BIR commissioner Caesar Dulay signed a revenue memorandum creating and activating regional teams to improve the bureau’s collection from the top 500 taxpayers in their respective areas, classified as “medium taxpayers.”