The Bureau of Internal Revenue on Wednesday registered a 5.1-percent increase in the number of registered business taxpayers to 4.63 million in 2021 from 4.41 million registered businesses in 2020.
BIR Commissioner Caesar Dulay reported the increase despite the pandemic and attributed it to the heightened implementation of the agency’s digitalization transformation programs.
This was complemented by BIR’s growing workforce of young and skilled professionals under the Duterte administration which enabled the agency to steadily improve its collection performance and broaden the taxpayer base in 2021, he said.
Data showed that since President Rodrigo Duterte took office, the BIR’s collection steadily grew from P1.58 trillion in 2016 to P1.78 trillion in 2017 and P1.96 trillion in 2018. The highest so far was in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, when collections amounted to P2.19 trillion, before dipping to P1.96 trillion at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 and climbing back to P2.08 trillion in 2021.