BIR falls short of revenue goal by P60 billion

The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) incurred a revenue shortfall of at least P60 billion for 2008, BIR Deputy Commissioner for Operations Nelson Aspe said yesterday.

“It’s not lower than P60 billion,” he said in a briefing yesterday.

This means that the agency collected only P785 billion last year against a revenue goal of P845 billion.

In December 2008 alone, the BIR collected at least P53 billion, Aspe also said.

This is significantly below November 2008 collections of P76.745 billion, data from the agency also showed.

This year, the BIR is tasked to collect P968.3 billion.

With a higher revenue target, the agency is putting in place measures aimed at boosting revenues.

One such measure is to expand its taxpayers’ database.

While the BIR fell short of its revenue target, the Bureau of Customs (BOC) met its collection goal last year but this was due mainly to non-cash revenues.

The BOC collected P260.68 billion for 2008, or P6.204 billion above the agency’s revenue goal of P254.4 billion for last year.

Officials attributed the rosy figures to hefty gains from the government’s tax expenditure fund or the so-called TEF.

The TEF is a subsidy released by the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) to government-owned and controlled corporations and state-run companies mainly to settle customs duties and other taxes arising from the importation of goods.

Cash revenues of the BOC come from tariffs or duties paid by importers to the agency for goods entering the country while non-cash items come from the tax expenditure funds (TEF) of GOCCs.

For 2009, the BOC expressed hopes that the agency would meet the target of P317 billion.

Finance Secretary Margarito Teves, for his part, said it is too early to announce the country’s fiscal position for last year despite preliminary figures from the BIR and the BOC.

The government hopes to have contained the budget deficit last year at P75 billion.

This year, Teves said, the government is still sticking to the revised budget deficit program of P102 billion despite prodding from analysts and multilateral agencies to post a bigger deficit.

Analysts have said that a bigger deficit would be necessary so that the government could have additional funds to pump-prime the economy.