BOI streamlines processing of perks

MANILA, Philippines - The Board of Investments (BOI) is streamlining the application and approval process of tax incentives to encourage the flow of investments, Trade Undersecretary and board managing head Adrian Cristobal Jr. said over the weekend.

‘We reviewed our processes to determine how we can improve our services to investors,” said Cristobal.

As of now, the BOI has reduced the number of data items required in the application to only 14 from 52.

Cristobal said that data which are irrelevant to the application for income tax holiday (ITH) will no longer be required. The data requirements will vary from sector to sector.

“Investors also have difficulties gathering the requirements and this causes hesitation on the part of investors to apply,” he said.

The evaluation documents to be reviewed by BOI investment specialists will also be reduced to two to three pages from 15. The number of days will also reduced to five working days from 20 working days.

As of March, the BOI has pending applications for 141 projects.

The BOI is first testing the new approval process on applications from the agribusiness, mass housing, and tourist sector which are “not very complicated to evaluate.”

“The existing process may have contributed to the lower number of approvals in March, although the main reason is still the lack of a single big investment compared to the previous year,” said Cristobal.

Investments approved by the BOI in the first quarter of the year fell 83.6 percent to only P18.368 billion from the P110. 404 billion in the same period last year largely because of the lack of a single big ticket investment in the period such as the P74.8-billion investment made by Petron Corp. in the first quarter of 2011 for the modernization and expansion of its Bataan facility.

A total of 72 projects in the real estate, manufacturing, and accommodation and food service sectors were approved. These approved projects are expected to create 8,622 jobs once these are fully operational.