The Bureaus of Internal Revenue (BIR) and of Customs (BOC) are set to forge an agreement on information sharing and coordination, among other ways of cooperation, to strengthen their joint campaign against smuggling and beef up collections on excise taxes on imports.
Reporting during a recent Executive Committee (Execom) meeting of the Department of Finance (DOF), BIR Commissioner Caesar Dulay said the bureau will also create a “strike team” to run after smugglers and counterfeiters of locally produced goods.
Dulay said the BIR is currently meeting with the BOC to finetune the provisions of the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) on information sharing, coordination and linkages, among other proposed measures, to help combat smuggling.
The BIR strike team, meanwhile, would “act as lead and point coordinator for all BIR enforcement activities on smuggled articles and locally manufactured counterfeit excisable products,” Dulay said.
The BIR-BOC agreement is an offshoot of Dominguez’s earlier directive to both agencies to strengthen their cooperation at the regional level by creating joint anti-smuggling task forces in revenue and customs districts outside Metro Manila.
BOC Commissioner Isidro Lapeña had earlier complied with the order by issuing a memorandum to all district directors of the customs bureau to coordinate with the regional offices of the BIR in forming Joint Anti-Smuggling Units.
Dominguez earlier pointed out that as a result of the “intensified and coordinated drive by the BIR and BOC against cigarette manufacturer Mighty Corporation, the government was able to collect around P30 billion ($600 million) in taxes from this tax cheat, which is the largest tax settlement ever in the country’s history.
He said this accomplishment enabled both the BIR and BOC to hit over 97 percent of their respective accomplishment rates for 2017.
The BIR achieved 97.18 percent of its revenue goal of P1.829 trillion, collecting a total of P1.777 trillion in 2017 while the BOC collected P457.553 billion as against a revenue target of P467.896 billion, representing an accomplishment rate of 97.7 percent for that year.
According to Dominguez, preliminary data show that the tax effort in 2017 registered at 14.3 percent, which is the highest in the last 11 years.
In the past administration, the tax effort increased by an average of 0.3 percentage points per year as compared to 2017’s 0.6 percentage points increase from the previous year, the highest rate of improvement since 2009, which Dominguez said was largely a result of a more efficient tax collection, as the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) Law was not yet in effect last year.
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