Senator Raffy Tulfo on Tuesday urged the Bureau of Internal Revenue to go after big-time tax evaders instead of persistently targeting low-income earners and small-time business owners.
"Every time you need additional taxes because you are having a shortfall in your collection target, you always go after the small people," Tulfo said during the Senate budget hearing for the Department of Finance and its attached agencies.
He recalled that as early as 2010, the BIR proposed to require pedicab and tricycle drivers, market vendors and sari-sari store owners to issue receipts for products or services sold for more than P25.
Likewise, Tulfo mentioned the bureau's public warning to vloggers to pay their taxes in 2021.
"If the BIR is really serious to collect big revenue through taxation, why not target those big fishes such as oil companies? A huge sum of money is lost to the government in oil smuggling every year," he said.
"The DoF (Department of Finance) said that the solution to this is fuel marking, where P439 billion was collected," he added.
In response, Customs Commissioner Yogi Filemon Ruiz said the government collected P457.28 billion from September 2019 to July 2022.
However, Tulfo stressed that BIR cannot hide under the figure released by the DoF that the taxes collected from marked fuel products by customs duties amounted to more than P400 billion.
BoC challenged
The lawmaker challenged the Bureau of Customs to release records proving that all the marked fuel products of the bureau match data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which he said has global data showing all companies exporting oil in the country.
Failure of these records to match would signify that oil smuggling is rampant in the country despite the government's P1.9-B pesos yearly contract with Switzerland -based inspection services provider Societe Generale de Surveillance, which ensures that marker is added to the fuel accurately.
Tulfo lamented that the bureau should provide records of the supposed 1,700 gasoline stations physically inspected by the SGS every month in the previous years, to ensure accuracy.