THE Aquino administration will push its revenue-collecting agencies to collect more next year so it could sustain its no-new taxes policy until 2012.

A Finance official said the administration’s economic manager, during the Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) meeting last week, decided to stretch further the collection targets of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) and the Bureau of Customs (BOC) to support the government’s growing budget needs.

Revenues from the BIR and the BOC comprise about 95 percent of the entire cash flow of the government; the rest comes from the Bureau of Treasury and the state’s share in the net income of government-owned and -controlled corporations (GOCCs).

According to the new targets set by the DBCC, the BIR’s goal was increased to P1.066 trillion for 2012, or 13.4 percent more than this year’s target of P920 billion.

The BOC’s will be increased by 14 percent to P365.1 billion in 2012 from P320 billion this year.

The target revenues of the two agencies are expected to support the proposed P1.8-trillion government budget for 2012, or a nearly 10-percent increase from this year’s P1.645 trillion, a Finance official said.

The proposed 2012 budget used an economic-growth forecast of 5.5-percent to 6.5-percent gross domestic product, although the government has said it has an “aspirational goal” of 7-percent to 8-percent growth.

For the budget deficit, the Aquino administration’s economic team hopes to bring down the ceiling to 2.6 percent of the country’s GDP, or about P286 billion, against this year's deficit ceiling of P300 billion, or 3.2 percent of GDP.

When President Aquino assumed office last year, he promised that the government would not impose new tax measures, at least for the next 18 months, or until December this year.

Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima, in an earlier interview, said there will be no new taxes this year but made no assurances that the policy will be continued in succeeding years.

But in Washington, warning has been aired. “The [Philippine] government’s success in containing and reducing the budget deficit is to be applauded, but the structurally low tax incidence threatens to undermine fiscal sustainability over the longer run,” said a policy note of the Washington-based Institute of International Finance said.