The government’s ability to collect taxes continued to languish in levels far below that typically reported by peers in the region, with the Department of Finance citing a tax effort ratio of only 13.72 percent in the first 11 months last year.
While the number was 0.2 percent higher than a year earlier, the country’s tax effort performance proved inferior to the performance of countries under the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“The tax effort also rose by 0.2 percentage point to 13.7 percent due to tax administration improvements. No new tax measure was implemented during the period,” Department of Finance Undersecretary Gil S. Beltran said of tax collection as percent of local output
or the GDP.
While this was up from the tax effort of 13.45 percent in the same period in 2014, this was short of the projected 15 percent at end-2015.
As a result, the IMF asked the fiscal authorities to get more of its
taxpaying public to be more conscious of their civic duties and pay more tax than they do at present.
Total tax revenues collected by the government hit P1.67 trillion at the end of November 2015, up 7.2 percent from P1.558 trillion reported in the same period in 2014.
The bulk came from the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) which hauled in P1.327 trillion worth of taxes as of end-November 2015.
This represented growth averaging 8.8 percent from P1.22 trillion collected in the same period the
previous year.
The Bureau of Customs, meanwhile, reported collections of P329.8 billion, up by 1.6 percent from the P324.6 billion reported in end–November 2014.
Other government offices were able to collect P14.1 billion in taxes, also up by 3.6 percent from the P13.6 billion seen in the previous year.