THE Finance Department is pushing for amendments to the rules in the Lateral Attrition Law that rewards revenue officials who exceed their collection targets and at the same time penalizes those that fail to attain their goals.
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said the department planned to draft regulations that would hold field officials of tax collection agencies accountable for the assessments they made under the Lateral Attrition Law.
“One of the things that we are trying to do is develop rules to hold the collectors on account for their assessments. You know some of their assessments are totally out of this world, and that is one of the reasons why we have this controversy,” Dominguez said over the weekend.
Dominguez was referring to the reported huge discrepancy in the amount of taxes paid by Del Monte Philippines Inc. to the Bureau of Internal Revenue from 2011 to 2013.
BIR officials said in an earlier briefing the tax assessment for Del Monte for the three-year period totaled P8.7 billion but the conpany paid only P65 million to the agency.
Dominguez said because field officials were not called to account for the assessments they made, “they make this wild assessments…. So we are trying to implement a way on how to curb this abuses and harassment techniques.”
Finance Undersecretary Antonette Tionko said the implementing rules and regulations of the law was “old” and difficult to apply to the current situation of the BIR and the Bureau of Customs.
Earlier reports said Congress was planning to expedite the passage of a bill putting in place a stricter procedure that the BIR must follow when dealing with protested assessment cases.
Signed by former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in 2005, the law remained unimplemented as fiscal authorities were not able to come up with an effective way in fixing the annual collection goal.
Under the law, revenue officials who fall short of their collection targets by at least 7.5 percent would be dismissed from service while those who go beyond expectations would be given incentives.
House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez in September last year pushed for the full implementation of the law.
The Duterte administration aims to increase tax collection to fund its social and infrastructure projects to further boost the economy which has been on an upward growth trajectory for the past years.