An ally of the Marcos family, former Senate president Juan Ponce Enrile, said Monday that presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is not responsible for the estate tax that the Department of Finance wants to collect.
Enrile, a lawyer and a tax expert, said any tax liabilities that the Marcos estate now faces cannot be passed on to Marcos, especially since most of them are still being heard in the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court.
Enrile said that before the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) can charge Marcos and his mother—former first lady Imelda Marcos—as administrators of the family estate, the case must first be settled in court.
The Department of Finance recently said it is expediting the BIR’s collection of estate tax, which was originally P23 billion but that has now ballooned to P203 billion.
In December, the BIR wrote to the Marcos heirs to request the payment of the corresponding tax.
But for Enrile, the job of estate administrators is “to gather the assets, gather the liabilities, and then establish the partition plan, and sell the assets to pay liabilities.”
He said in case the administrators are not able to sell the assets for liquidation of liabilities, and it is included in the tax returns, there is still no violation for Bongbong Marcos.
He said Marcos needs to consolidate all assets and liabilities, then liquidate them.
“Then after paying the liabilities … after paying all the taxes they will submit to the court … partition of estates … he has to file an estate return,” he said.
Enrile added that this is a long process, because some of the properties or assets are considered ill-gotten wealth of the government.
Despite the Supreme Court ruling on June 5, 1997 on Marcoses’ estate tax liability, there are still pending issues related to the abandoned property that must be resolved.
Meanwhile, former Internal Revenue Deputy Commissioner Edwin Abella said the roles of an estate “executor” and “administrator” are different.
“That’s why the tax identification number (TIN) is different,” Abella said.
“It means that the government or the BIR in particular just needs to go after the estate itself,” he said.
Abella said even President Rodrigo Duterte “cannot reverse the decision nor preempt and make the decision himself. The tax code is clear on this.”
The Marcoses “have been subjected to harassment since they left office, in fact, their properties have been subjected to auction, and have been sequestered,” he said.
Also on Monday, the Marcos camp said regional directors and district officers of the BIR said the heirs and administrators of the late President Marcos’s estate cannot be compelled or sued in court for tax evasion, even if they failed to pay the more than P203 billion tax assessment on the latter’s assets.
The press release quoted BIR officials as saying the estate tax is levied on real and personal properties of a dead person and not on the
assets owned by his relatives but did not name who these officials were.