Text messages to confirm tax payments

Can mobile phone technology thwart tax payment scams?

Starting this month, corporate taxpayers will have a little peace of mind when they make their payments through banks.

Whether or not their hard-earned corporate earnings will really go to government coffers or merely to the pockets of unscrupulous individuals can now be traced through the ever popular Short Messaging System (SMS).

Recently, the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) tapped Smart Communications Inc. (Smart) to send text message confirmations to corporate taxpayers confirming receipt of payments made through banks.

Under this program, text messages will be automatically sent to the mobile phones of designated corporate officers once the BIR has received payments for various taxes such as income tax, value-added taxes (VAT) and excise taxes.

This initiative from BIR Commissioner Guillermo Parayno in cooperation with the Bankers Association of the Philippines (BAP) is part of the government‘s efforts to improve tax collection through the use of electronic and mobile technologies.

Notifications via text messages, in particular, are designed to help prevent cases where tax payments made by corporations through banks are diverted into dummy accounts and never really reach the government.

Earlier this year, the BIR discovered several high-profile cases of tax payment anomalies resulting in hundreds of millions of pesos in losses to the government

Under the BIR/BAP-Smart agreement, Smart provided the infrastructure needed to connect BIR’s systems with the SMS facilities of Smart.

Five computer servers have been installed at the BIR head office in Quezon City and in its regional offices in Cebu, Davao, and La Union.

To receive text message notifications, corporations must enroll the name of the officer and his mobile phone number with the BIR.

The service will start later this month.