Businessmen urge Congress to cut taxes

AS CONGRESS resumed on Tuesday, tax managers called on legislators to “immediately” pass pending bills meant to slash income tax rates.

In a statement, the Tax Management Association of the Philippines said it is “specifically calling on the House of Representatives and the Senate to include among its priority measures the passage of an income tax bill, which provides for the indexing of tax brackets to inflation and a mechanism for its automatic indexation.”

“While this proposal only involves the updating of the tax brackets and is not what TMAP, along with other business groups that supported the Unity Statement on Income Tax Reform, originally had in mind, TMAP believes that this will immediately alleviate somehow the plight of salaried individuals who are ‘overtaxed’ under the current system,” the group said.

“TMAP believes that this proposal for indexation of tax brackets would not need further study by the government, unlike other proposed tax reform measures such as the lowering of tax rates. This proposal will only involve amending the Tax Code to indicate the revised individual income tax table with a provision for its automatic indexing on a periodic basis; thus, enabling Congress and the Senate to easily enact it at the soonest possible time,” it added.

TMAP president Terrence Conrad H. Bello noted that the government has been able to “continuously raise higher and higher taxes over the last 19 years simply because of inflation, rather than improved tax administration, and the only way to correct this is to bring back the real value of taxes brackets to their 1997 levels.”