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Uh-oh, based on a study by the tax experts in the Senate, it seems the Aquino (Part II) administration wants to promote in this country imported—as in “foreign”—brands of alcohol and tobacco products.

Featured in the Palace list of priority bills in Congress is a complete overhaul of the excise tax on alcohol and tobacco products—the so-called sin taxes—again.

Spearheading the move is the Department of Finance, which has already forwarded the proposed overhaul and a study on its effects to both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The proposed bill, in fact, was already filed in the House, while the Senate is still trying to look deeper into it.

To justify the overhaul, the DoF told Congress that its proposal would increase tax collection from sales of the so-called sin products. From what I gathered, the DoF claimed that the increase could reach P60 billion a year. Wow!

Similar claims of increase in tax takes come back again and again as the usual reasons given by the government when, in the past couple of decades, somebody wanted to tinker with the main features of the sin tax law.

Come to think of it, several bills proposing to change the system suddenly come up at the start of every new administration in the past several years. Without fail. And we all know that some foreign companies have been lobbying for such an overhaul, apparently to get a stronghold in the local market.

Sin taxes thus seem to have become the favorite pastime of the government; the local alcohol and tobacco sector, its favorite whipping boy.

The tax experts in the Senate, officially known as the Senate Tax Study and Research Office, or the STSRO, in effect contradicted the DoF claim on the projected increase in tax collection as a result of the sin tax overhaul.

The STSRO study, which was presented to Sen. Ralph Recto, chair of the Senate ways and means committee, said actual collections might fall short of what the DoF claimed they would be.

And why is that? According to the STSRO, the proposed system would be more favorable to imported products.

The STSRO thus feared that the shift toward imported products could, in turn, encourage a “misdeclaration” of imported shipments, similar to what happened in the case of imported automobiles.

In other words, the sin tax system endorsed by the Aquino (Part II) administration tends to encourage “cheating” in tax payments for imported spirits and cigarettes.

And so how can the proposed new system raise government revenue from sin products?

Worse, because the proposed system has a built-in “bias” (word used by the Senate experts) in favor of imports, it could kill the local makers of alcohol and tobacco products.

Thousands of jobs will be lost in this country where the jobless runs up to about 3 million and the underemployed at even higher clip of about 8 million.

Worst of all, to the Senate team, the new system would tend to favor the rich and punish the poor. And let us admit it: Vices such as smoking and drinking know no race, religion, gender or social class.

The Senate study concludes that, under the new system proposed by the Palace, cheap brands of alcohol and tobacco products will become as expensive as the high-end products. The products will be beyond the reach of the poor.

Let us not fool ourselves into believing that, because of pricey drinks and smoke, the poor will stop smoking and drinking. They are bound to switch to the smuggled (i.e. discounted priced) items.

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Based on the computation made by party list Rep. Walden Bello (Akbayan), Chief Justice Renato Corona did not declare in his SALN for 2010 certain assets worth about P55 million.

That amount, to many of us, is already a huge fortune. Many would maim or kill for much less.

And so it may be difficult for the defense team of the Chief Justice to make us believe that the undeclared P55 million was a mere oversight, a slight error, something that the Chief Justice could easily correct henceforth, thus removing the small mistake, helping him keep his position as head of the judiciary.

It seems that his 2010 SALN showed his net worth to have been about P23 million. From the testimonies in the ongoing trial of the Chief Justice in the Senate, we already know that his net worth should have been close to P79 million, even considering the huge discounts that he supposedly obtained in buying an upscale penthouse unit at a posh location in the metropolis.

In cash alone, it seems the Chief Justice did not declare in his 2010 SALN the deposits in two banks (PSBank and BPI) amounting to more than P30 million.

Also, certain assets (the house and lot in Quezon City, condominium unit at Burgundy Plaza, condo unit at The Columns, a condo at Bonifacio Ridge and the penthouse at Bellagio Towers) did not show up in the SALN.

Nor did the 2010 SALN show his ownership of a lot in the high-end subdivision La Vista (Quezon City), which reportedly was acquired in 2003 for P11 million, and a lot in the pricey McKinley Hills (at least P80,000 per square meter at today’s going rate, if you can find any seller), which was acquired in 2008 for P6 million.

To say that those undeclared assets were the result of mere lapses may be stretching our gullibility down here too much.

By the way, this daily already reported just how bad “mistakes” in the SALN could be to some lowly government employees, such as that man in Bicol who did not declare that he had a relative in the provincial government, or the clerk of court who did not declare that she was operating a market stall.

They were both dismissed from their positions. One of them was even sent to jail.