BPO seeks update in PH incentive system

IBPAP board trustee Rainerio Borja said it was critical for the Philippines to maintain its competitiveness in the global outsourcing industry as there “are a lot of countries on our tails in this industry—countries from the Asia Pacific region, Africa, Latin America and even Europe.”

Roadmap

Fiscal and nonfiscal incentives, among other measures, would be necessary to enable the Philippines to further strengthen its position in the global market, he said.

In particular, the IBPAP’s advocacy under the Philippine IT-BPM Roadmap 2022 would focus on “continued government support through an economic and policy framework that is conducive to trade and investment by all existing and prospective partners from all geographies; evidence-based evaluation of incentives (fiscal and nonfiscal); modernization of policy and regulation like flexible working arrangements that reflect global trends in IT-BPM, and improvement of the IT-BPM sector information that will enable evidence-based policy setting.”

“One of our focus is on incentives—either we maintain or modernize our incentives because some of them needs updating. The benefits we have from the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza) are very location specific and we can maybe modernize some of those so we can also carry the Peza  incentives outside (the economic zones), or maybe we can set up more Peza locations,” Borja said.

“So there are things like fiscal incentives, we have to make sure these [including  tax holidays] remain. But there are also nonfiscal incentives [which may include] lending out government facilities to encourage more BPOs to set up in the provinces,” he added.