The Department of Finance (DoF) continue to up its efforts in plugging the leakages incurred in the Bureau of Customs’ (BoC) revenue collections, Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran said.

“We have already planned for that. In the previous projections that we showed, we will increase tax effort by one percentage point from now to 2022. It will close the gap,” Beltran told reporters on the sidelines of the Development Budget Coordination Committee’s budget hearing last week.

According to him, measures are already being placed which will help them bring their initiative into fruition.

“One is fuel marking. Second is e-invoicing, it will be in effect by 2022 and of course, the running after those who manufacture seals, cigarette stamps,” the Finance executive said.

Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III earlier said that the implementation of the fuel marking program, which began during the third quarter this year is expected to generate some P5 billion additional revenues for the government.

Originally, the government estimated a massive P20 to P40 billion in revenues from the program, but with its implementation falling on the third quarter of the year, it was reduced to at least P5 billion.

Moreover, the measures serve as a response to the question raised by Senator Panfilo Lacson last week, citing data from World Bank which showed massive discrepancy in imports and revenues in the country.

The Finance executive then explained that they are working hard to seal the gap in BoC collections noting that they don’t have the data yet in terms of how much the measures could reduce such leakages.

“We don’t have that. We still have faith in our own documents except, differences will remain and we don’t think that it is all tax leakages. Some of it are imported items for exports, which went through the ecozones,” Beltran said.

To recall, discrepancy data in 2017 cited from the World Bank amounted to $13.6 billion or P684.84 billion as the Philippines declared $18.48 billion worth of Chinese imports versus China’s declaration of $32.07 in exports.