BAGUIO CITY – More than ninety percent of the more than 5,000 point of sale (POS) and cash register machines (CRMs) inspected by fraud experts of the Cordillera office of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR-CAR) in the different parts of the region have discrepancies that have deprived the government of taxes due.
BIR-CAR officer-in-charge Douglas Rufino said that the previously inspected POS and CRMs with discrepancies will be the subject of monitoring and validations to guarantee that the discrepancies will be corrected by the concerned businessmen for them to pay the right taxes due to the government in the coming months.
“We will continue to equip our personnel to detect the computer-assisted fraud being committed by erring businessmen who continue to evade paying the right taxes that they are supposed to pay to the government,” Rufino stressed.
The BIR-CAR official claimed that while erring taxpayers are trying their best to evade the payment of substantial taxes, the agency remains steadfast in providing the needed trainings to its personnel for them to detect the committed fraud and compel the businessmen to pay the right taxes.
Lawyer Reynolf Panganiban, BIR Baguio revenue district officer, disclosed that the fraud threshold of POS and CRMs is 30 percent and above but the discrepancies recorded by the said machines that they were able to inspect were close to the said limit that is why the businessmen were required to pay the balance of the taxes they paid and the discovered discrepancies.
Panganiban warned businessmen whose POS and CRMs continue to have discrepancies that the BIR will be constrained to file the appropriate charges against them if only to compel them to be honest in paying their taxes to the government.
Under existing BIR rules and regulations, businessmen using POS and CRMs must first register the said machines to the BIR to make sure that it will be free from computer-assisted fraud that will result to the deprivation of the government of the right taxes that should be paid by them.
According to him, BIR personnel continue to update their skills and knowledge on computer-assisted fraud so that they will be capable of immediately detecting the discrepancies that arise during surprise monitoring of the machines registered under the names of businessmen doing business around the region.
For this year, BIR-CAR was given a tax collection goal of more than P7.8 billion which is only 5 percent higher compared to its tax collection goal last year.
However, P1.2 billion of the said goal is considered to be foregone of the implementation of the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) wherein workers having an annual gross income of P250,000 and below will be exempted from the payment of income taxes, thus, the same has been transferred to their projected goal on value added tax which is considered to be imposed on the purchase of goods and services.
BIR-CAR personnel will be going around the region to explain the benefits of the TRAIN to the ordinary Filipinos considering the numerous misconception on its alleged negative impact to the prices of basic commodities being bought by ordinary Filipinos in the markets.
By HENT
