Tax-paid fuel marked by gov’t breaches 3B liters

The volume of tax-paid fuel already marked by the government breached the three-billion liter mark last week, Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III said.

Citing a report from the Bureau of Customs, Dominguez said that as of Feb. 14, the BOC marked 2.4 billion liters of oil products on top of 913 million liters covered by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), or a combined 3.21 billion liters.

Dominguez said the following oil companies had paid the correct excise taxes and import duties slapped on their products: Chevron, Filoil Energy, Insular Oil, Petron, Phoenix Petroleum, PTT, Seaoil, Shell, Unioil and Warbucks Petroleum.

Dominguez said the following firms located within the Subic Bay Freeport Zone had also participated in the fuel-marking program: Era1 Petroleum, Goldenshare Commercial, High Glory Subic International, Jadelink, Marubeni Philippines and Microdragon Petroleum.

“We are the only administration to fully implement a fuel-marking program nationwide. Through this program, we expect smuggling and misdeclaration of petroleum products to be greatly reduced, if not totally eradicated, and revenue collections to dramatically increase,” Dominguez said in a speech before the Wallace Business Forum last week.

The government expects to raise an additional P20 billion in tax revenues this year from the fuel-marking program to be fully implemented starting the middle of this month.

Last year, the Department of Finance (DOF) estimated the total volume of fuel needed to be marked at 15.2 billion liters—6.8 billion liters for the BOC and 8.4 billion liters for the BIR.

Under the joint fuel-marking guidelines issued last year, the BOC leads fuel marking in depots, tank trucks, vessels, warehouses and other fuel-transporting vehicles, while the BIR oversees testing in refineries, their attached depots, gasoline stations and other retail outlets.

The fuel-marking rules granted the BOC and the BIR with police authority during field testing such that when they found adulterated, diluted or unmarked petroleum, officers can seize the products and arrest unscrupulous traders.

Fuel marking costs P0.06884 a liter, which will be shouldered by the government during its first year of implementation.

SGS Philippines Inc. and Switzerland-based Sicpa SA were hired as marker provider under a five-year contract, which mandated their joint venture to produce and provide the ready-to-use official marker as well as conduct actual marking in all taxable oil products nationwide.

In 2016, government estimates showed foregone revenues from oil smuggling amounted to between P27 billion and P44 billion. —Ben O. de Vera INQ