The Governance Commission for Government-Owned or –Controlled Corporations (GCG) will review the organizational and staff structure of the proposed Philippine Tax Academy (PTA) that will serve as a training institution to provide revenue officials and staff continuing professional education on improving tax collection competence, efficiency and integrity.

Finance Undersecretary and Chief Economist Gil Beltran reported during a recent Executive Committee (Execom) meeting of the Department of Finance (DOF) that the Department of Budget and Management decided the tax academy “must be (a) GCG-covered entity per Republic Act 10143.”

RA 10143, which was signed into law almost seven years ago during the 14th Congress, empowers the DOF to set up a tax academy to provide continuous training and education to personnel of the Bureaus of Internal Revenue (BIR), of Customs (BOC) and of Local Government Finance (BLGF).

Beltran told Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III at the Execom meeting that the DBM had also decided that the initial funding for the country’s first ever tax academy would be sourced from the government’s support to GOCCs through the annual budget or the General Appropriations Act.

The DOF, thru its Legal Group, has been reviewing the implementing rules and regulations of the tax academy, said Beltran. The DOF earlier submitted to the GCG the organizational structure and staffing pattern of the academy for its approval.

Last October, the DOF said it was eyeing a grant from the United States government for the establishment of the PTA.

Dominguez pitched the project in a recent meeting in Washington DC with David Malpass, the US Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs.

He told Malpass that the PTA, which the DOF plans to set up in January, would be a long-term initiative of the DOF to further professionalize the BIR and BOC.

Dominguez also briefly discussed the proposed tax academy project in a recent forum in Washington DC organized by the US think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He said because of the US assistance in improving the skills of the BIR in analyzing data, tax authorities were able to nail the largest tax-fraud case in Philippine history. The government had collected $600 million recently from local cigarette company Mighty Corp. that was found cheating on its excise tax payments. The settlement offered by Mighty on its deficiency taxes was the largest sum of taxes ever collected by the government from a single corporate entity.

Dominguez said the planned tax academy would not involve any construction of new buildings but would focus on training revenue and customs officers to improve their efficiency and competencies in tax matters.

He said establishing the tax academy would help initiate a “culture change” within the BIR and BOC.

In both his meeting with Malpass and at the CSIS forum, Dominguez said he would like to transform the BIR and BOC into highly professionalized agencies in which its employees carry out their duties in the same way that agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) do so with honesty and integrity.