THE Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) failed to hit its September collection goal as a result of lower sales of the Treasury bonds and bills for the period, resulting in a P496-million shortfall.

Internal Revenue Commissioner Kim Henares said the agency collected only P66.55 billion for the month against its target of P67.04 billion.

“Our shortfall is slight, at only 1.14 percent of total collections, but it is a shortfall nevertheless. We will have to work even harder in the last three months of the year in order to meet our target,” Henares said in a press conference. “It is evident that there are still people who continue to pay less tax than what they are supposed to under the law. It is only fair to those paying correctly that we run after those who do not.”

If the Bureau of the Treasury floated bonds as scheduled for the month, the BIR’s collection would have had a surplus of about P1 billion, Henares said.

The Treasury was scheduled to sell in September some P36 billion worth of T-bills and T-bonds, but it managed to award only P33.9 billion of debt after a series of rejections, especially for the short-term paper.  

Of the P67.04-billion target of the BIR for the month, P62.91 billion should have come from its operations. Henares said BIR collection from operations amounted to P63.44 billion, or P521 million more than the goal, or a growth of 12 percent or P6.79 billion from last year’s revenues.

“Actual taxes collected during the month kept pace with the target, missing by just a slight margin of 0.7 percent,” Henares said.

From January to September, the BIR, the government’s largest revenue-collection agency, generated a total of P686.26 billion, short of its target by P7.89 billion, or more than 1 percent, for the first nine months of the year. Compared with last year’s figure, the BIR’s collection for the nine-month period posted an excess of P78.93 billion or a growth rate of 13 percent.

Actual collections from January to September 2010 amounted to P607.33 billion.