POGOs: Tax-evading, sex den-hosting, criminal-coddling insufferables
Credit to Author: Marlen V. Ronquillo| Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2020 17:48:34 +0000
The first thing to consider in the evaluation of whether to ban Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGOs) in the country or not comes in form of a question. Why are POGOs, which are of, for and by the mainland Chinese, banned in China?
They are outlawed in China because they are considered as criminal enterprises, with no place in the mainstream Chinese society. The people behind these gambling enterprises are likewise shunned in the mainland and many have been linked to crimes other than illegal gambling. The POGO people, and this is an understatement, are pariahs in their own country.
That they have been fully embraced here, celebrated as a bright spot in the real estate sector, and allowed to thrive in many suburban enclaves is perhaps testament to what gutter our supposed investment-attraction policies has sunk. “To the level of the gutter” is an apt description of that type of policy consideration that has fully and unequivocally embraced the POGOs. Supposedly, POGOs are a cash cow in a revenue generation environment that is lacking in real cash cows. Of course, the real cash cows in our revenue ecosystem are the tired and weary workers, the ordinary wage earners that soon, will pay more taxes than the country’s corporate fat cats.
That revenue-generating argument, the principal reason why the Duterte government has embraced the POGOs with very little reservation, has unravelled in a recent Senate hearing.
Last year, according to the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), the Chinese citizens running the POGOs here failed to pay P50 billion in taxes. And, most probably, that P50 billion was a conservative estimate, with the final total of the tax evasion, much, much bigger. What the top BIR people focused on were the labor and revenue issues related to the POGOs. For what is worth it, let us place the P50 billion unpaid taxes in the proper context, its place in the national expenditure program.
For this year, the public education system, which has been historically plagued by lack of classrooms, proposed a more-than-P100-billion budget for classroom construction. The budget proposal was aimed at filling up the classroom void. Because there is not enough money for everything, only P10 billion of that budgetary request was granted.
Had the Chinese citizens running the fully embraced POGOs here paid their proper taxes, more than half of the request for classroom building this year, which was the P10-billion originally allocated and the P50 billion in lost revenues from the POGO tax evasion — could have been granted. That is how critical to proper tax payments is to the public education sector in particular and the national good in general.
Other than the tax evasion, there is a bigger social cost that is being dealt by the presence of the POGOs in the country — Chinese criminal elements slip into the country using the POGOs as front. With the POGOs providing the legal cover, the criminal elements wanted in their home country for various crimes, seamlessly find a friendly host to their activities.
At that same Senate hearing on the POGOs, it was revealed that a total of 733 Chinese fugitives slipped into the country last year. How they did that under the watch of the Bureau of Immigration, the International Police and the local law enforcers remain a mystery.
A total of 7,000 POGO workers have been found to enter the country without the proper labor and employment permits. They entered as tourists, and then brazenly worked in the POGOs like entitled brats over and above the laws.
The social cost does not end with Chinese fugitives getting sanctuaries in the POGOs.
At another senate hearing, POGOs, deemed as criminal enterprises in their own country, have demonstrated that tax evasion and disregarding the country’s labor and immigration laws are not enough. With the POGO came the inevitable offspring of coddling criminal elements — prostitution.
To serve the sexual needs of POGO workers, prostitution, mostly contracted online, has thrived. Pimps serving the needs of POGO workers use various online apps to procure women sex workers. The prostitution was a by-product, a natural offspring of the POGOs.
The final act of degradation to women, ordering them online to serve the lust of the POGO workers, was a blow delivered by the POGOs. And many of the women sucked into that web of crime and prostitution are Filipinas. Pinays, as sex slaves, procured using the jargon of fast food ordering. Could there be a worse treatment of our women?
Sen. Emmanuel Joel Villanueva, chairman of the Labor committee, said POGOs contribute less than 1 percent to the country’s gross domestic product. That alone shatters the argument that they are an economic cash cow. Agriculture, beaten down, neglected and marginalized by state policies, contribute 10 times as much.
Ban the POGOs and the send the criminals back to China.
It is the country’s “pivot to China” that is probably driving the policy of leniency, even if what we are hosting and embracing are populated by criminals.