The government will provide some 3.4 million employees in small businesses with a wage subsidy of P5,000 to P8,000 per eligible worker affected by the enhanced community quarantine in Luzon and other parts of the country, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said Tuesday.
He said the wage subsidy program would benefit 2.6 million workers whose employers were compliant with the Bureau of Internal Revenue and Social Security System regulations and, thus, could be easily identified and automatically processed for coverage if they are eligible.
The program will also support another 800,000 workers whose employers were not fully compliant with the SSS or BIR as the government understands that the non-compliance may have been caused by inadvertent mistakes on the part of the employer.
These workers who belong to the low- to medium-middle class are employed in some 1.6 million small businesses in the formal sector that are affected by the ECQ.
Dominguez and Finance Undersecretary Karl Kendrick Chua presented the wage subsidy program during a televised meeting presided by President Duterte late Monday night.
Dominguez said that while the ECQ affected most workers in both the formal and informal sectors, the president’s swift decision to implement it to contain the spread of COVID-19 had probably saved 100,000 Filipino lives, according to World Bank estimates.
“I had a meeting with the World Bank a few days ago, and they said that your decisiveness in first reducing the number of people coming into the Philippines in February and in March, followed by the lockdown, probably saved 100,000 lives in the Philippines,” Dominguez said.
“Thank you again for being very decisive in protecting the Filipino people against this COVID-19 outbreak,” Dominguez said, addressing the president during the meeting.
The Finance Department said that under the Small Business Wage Subsidy Program, the subsidy would range from P5,000 to P8,000 per beneficiary. The subsidy will be for two months and will cost a total of P50.8 billion.
Under the program, small businesses are defined as those not belonging to the top 2,745 large taxpayers of the BIR.
Dominguez said the details, mechanics and eligibility criteria under the program will be announced this week.
The online system for business owners to submit their list of employees via the SSS website is currently being pilot tested and is scheduled to go live this week.