The country’s two biggest tax-collection agencies will likely surpass their downgraded 2020 targets with combined revenues of up to P2.49 trillion by year’s end.
“The emerging revenue level of the BIR (Bureau of Internal Revenue) and the BOC (Bureau of Customs) for 2020 is estimated to be P1.95 trillion and P548.6 billion, respectively,” Department of Budget and Management Assistant Secretary Rolando Toledo said last week, citing the latest Development Budget Coordination Committee estimates.
Toledo said both the BOC and the BIR were expected to breach their end-2020 targets of P506.2 billion and P1.69 trillion, respectively.
As of end-November, the BOC’s collection of import duties and other taxes amounted to P493.3 billion or 97 percent of its 2020 program.
Meanwhile, the BIR’s end-October tax take reached P1.59 trillion or 94 percent of its full-year target such that officials believed that they likely hit their full-year 2020 goal in November.
But the year-to-date collections remained lower year-on-year amid a pandemic-induced recession such that the Cabinet-level DBCC earlier on slashed the revenue agencies’ 2020 targets—he BIR’s from P2.58 trillion originally and the BOC’s from P731 billion prepandemic.
Despite the higher emerging actual collection figures, Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran and Assistant Secretary Maria Teresa Habitan said the BOC and the BIR’s respective collection targets for 2020 were retained.
“We just updated the revenue outlook given actual collection performance as of October,” Habitan said last week.
Toledo said that based on actual end-October revenues, the government expects to collect up to P2.85 trillion in tax and nontax revenues by year’s end, up from the earlier projection of P2.52 trillion.
On the other hand, expenditures on public goods and services were seen to end the year at P4.23 trillion or lower than the previous program of P4.34 trillion as the government had been underspending and trying to catch up on its disbursements.—Ben O. de Vera INQ