2020 a challenging year for BIR – Dulay
Credit to Author: Mayvelin U. Caraballo, TMT| Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2020 16:23:44 +0000
COLLECTING taxes would be a challenge for the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) this year amid the expected negative impact of recent local and overseas developments, including a volcanic last month and a virus outbreak, on businesses, according to its chief.
“Early this year, we [faced] some challenges, [which] continue to challenge us. And this [would] probably challenge our economy,” BIR Commissioner Caesar Dulay said during the tax agency’s 2020 tax campaign kickoff in Pasay City on Tuesday.
“And for BIR, in particular, we have a challenging year in terms of revenue collections,” he added.
As an example, Dulay cited how the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) outbreak would affect business operations of airlines and other tourism-related firms.
Airline companies are included in the so-called Large Taxpayers Service of the BIR, which is tasked to collect P1.6 trillion this year.
Covid-19, which first broke out in the city of Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province in late December, has spread to more than two dozen countries, infected over 72,500 people and killed over 1,800 others, including one in the Philippines, as of Tuesday.
Despite this, Dulay said the BIR would just have to come up with ways on how to offset the anticipated lower collections from these firms.
“We will not use this event transpiring now as a reason for not achieving [our] goal and exceeding our gains obtained in 2019,” he added.
“We will continue to work with excellence and efficiency, so that the mandate given to this agency will be achieved with the cooperation and help of all,” the Internal Revenue chief said.
“For 2020, the goal is for efficient and extra service from the men and women of the BIR,” he added.
This year, the BIR is tasked to collect P2.5 trillion in taxes, 7.29-percent higher than the P2.33 trillion collected in 2019.
Earlier, BIR Deputy Commissioner Arnel Guballa admitted that the agency expected reduced tax collections from large taxpayers next month as the January 12 eruption of Taal Volcano in Batangas province and the Covid-19 outbreak hurt businesses.
He said most of these large taxpayers informed the agency that their voluntary payments for this month would not be as a good as what they remitted in the previous months.