‘Duterte, Cabinet to gain P8,500 a month from TRAIN law’

MANILA, Philippines — President Duterte, Cabinet members and other bureaucrats receiving huge salaries are benefitting from the controversial Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) law to the tune of P8,500 a month in income tax reduction.

This is according to Reps. Antonio Tinio and France Castro of party-list group Alliance of Concerned Teachers, who made the computation to illustrate the impact of TRAIN on government officials and low-ranking state workers.

Their computation shows that Duterte and Cabinet members like Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III and Economic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia all stand to gain P8,463.33 a month in income tax savings.

That is because the TRAIN law increased the amount of tax-free income for all individual taxpayers to a uniform P250,000 a year.

While the President and his Cabinet officials are benefitting from TRAIN, Tinio and Castro said there is zero benefit for a worker in Metro Manila receiving a monthly salary of P12,300.

They also said Duterte received a salary increase of P132,331 this year, while Cabinet members, lawmakers and other officials with equivalent rank got an P81,082 pay hike.

They said the President’s monthly salary is now about P300,000, while the basic compensation of Cabinet members has gone up to P200,000.

In contrast, they said a daily wage earner in Metro Manila worker received a P21 pay increase, while the teachers and nurses in government saw their monthly salary go up by a measly P500.

The two militant lawmakers pointed to the huge disparity in compensation between government officials and low-ranking personnel to drive home their message on the need to adjust the salaries of state employees.

They are proposing that the basic pay of teachers and nurses be increased from P21,000 to P30,000, and the lowest pay in the bureaucracy be adjusted from P9,000 to P16,000.

“After two years, we see that President Duterte has failed to deliver his campaign promises to uplift the Filipino people’s lives and livelihood, and instead succeeded to increase the people’s burden with the skyrocketing of prices since the implementation of the TRAIN law,” they said in a statement.

“While soldiers and policemen are now receiving doubled salaries since the start of the year, the administration sternly refuses to heed the clamor of government employees for a substantial salary increase,” they said.

Other militant lawmakers have said while many salaried workers benefit from TRAIN, their gain is more than offset by high consumer prices caused by tax increases the law imposed.