Dominguez reopens P11-B tax credit scam

Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III on Friday reopened the P11 billion tax credit certificate (TCC) scandal and vowed to prosecute the private individuals and public officials who allegedly made it happen.

The scam allowed ineligible and even non-existent companies to partake of government largesse by spurious means between 2008 and 2014.

Dominguez said he has created al task force within the Department of Finance (DoF) to recover P11.18 billion-worth of tax credits granted to these firms by the One-Stop Shop Inter-Agency and Duty Drawback Center (OSS) over a six-year period.

Finance Undersecretaries Antonette Tionko, who heads the agency’s Revenue Operations Group (ROG); Bayani Agabin, who heads the Legal Affairs Group and Gil Beltran, who heads the Policy Development and Management Services Group (PDMSG), are the task force members.

“Expect this department to pursue the appropriate charges against the public officers and private persons who manipulated and unjustly benefited from the tax credit process with the OSS,” Dominguez told a news conference on Friday.

Dominguez said the task force was in response to the findings of the Commission on Audit (CoA) in a 6 July 2018 report highlighting the erroneous issuance of 3,231 TCCs by the OSS from 2008 to 2014 in which P8.85 billion in tax credits were overstated and supported by spurious documents.

That same report cited another P2.34 billion worth of TCCs granted to claimants whose fiscal incentives have already expired.

A copy of the CoA report, Dominguez said, has been turned over to the Board of Investments “for appropriate action against the accredited enterprises.”

The members of the DoF task force provided further details of this newly uncovered tax credit scam during the press conference.

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