Yes, it’s that time of year again, the time when Filipinos are frantically packing their bags, booking midnight flights out of the country, drinking heavily or brushing up on their Russian Roulette. No, wait: that’s presidential election time. I’m talking about April 15, the time when most people are lining up to shove all their hastily-prepared tax documents in the direction of a savvy, motivated BIR tax preparer – and desperately hoping the files don’t spontaneously combust from overcooking.
Tax time in the Philippines is really kind of just window-dressing, since most of the country’s actual revenues come from overseas workers returning home during the Christmas holidays, where their hard-earned dollars (and other buoyant currencies) will help prop up the economy and government coffers for another fiscal period.
The real problem is convincing people who live here year-round to pay their taxes. Time and experience has shown that it usually helps to give people something positive to encourage them to keep on paying their taxes: better government, for instance, or better roads. Clearly, that’s not an option here.
Nevertheless, the BIR has tried many tactics to increase its revenues, some of them colorful and inventive. I’ve heard of surprise BIR raids on mall restaurants, conducted with TV cameras in tow, in a brave attempt to catch small, struggling businesses with their pants down. (Something like the tax collectors’ version of Cops, I guess.) It may make for good TV, but I doubt the such antics result in bolstered revenues. And you’ll never see the same TV crew crash into a large corporation’s boardroom and "demand to see the books." As always, it’s easier to put the heat on the small fry.
I heard of another tactic, supposedly employed by Singaporean tax officials to go after undeclared wealth, which the BIR is currently mulling: going after the dissatisfied wives. Apparently, wives of Singaporean bigwigs who sup too deeply at the trough and neglect (or cheat on) their wives are more than eager to see their spouses go down. So they’re very cooperative with tax collectors there. The lesson is clear: errant husbands had better start sharing the wealth, or else they’ll end up paying the piper.
In truth, people are always making jokes about the BIR, which suggests how little actual fear the agency inspires in the average Filipino. This is because it’s relatively easy to find a "sympathetic" ear among the BIR’s overworked tax workers. Yet elsewhere the tax profession has a way of chilling the soul, and tax collectors bestir a natural human loathing. (Think of Brad Pitt’s grim Death character in Meet Joe Black; the joke was, he told people he worked for the IRS.)
The Internal Revenue Service, America’s counterpart to the BIR, is no joke. In fact, mention of the IRS stirs the same sense of impending doom among Americans that one would feel upon encountering the Crazy 88 Yakuza clan from Kill Bill.
Death and taxes may be life’s two big certainties, but most Americans have an instinctive dread of the IRS that would make a choice between the two options simple: they’d choose death, because at least it occurs only once.
I had my own brush with the IRS about a dozen years ago after I had (completely innocently) failed to report some summer-job income on my yearly tax return. Okay, I failed to report it for about five years, and that seemed to make the IRS people a little pissy. So I started receiving grim, terse missives from the IRS about my (perfectly explainable) faux pas. (The Gothic font on the letterhead should have tipped me off that the tax bell was tolling for me.)
Anyway, with great trepidation I phoned an IRS agent (Is that the correct term? Or is it henchman? Minion? Demon apprentice?) to find out what was up.
I explained how I thought my employer had already reported the taxes being paid, since he had sucked an equivalent amount of money from my weekly paychecks way back when. It was a perfectly innocent mistake, and I added that the letters I had been receiving from the IRS (which had grown terser and grimmer in recent weeks, with images of the Grim Reaper and a gallows now decorating the letterhead) were starting to make me quite anxious. Didn’t the IRS have anything better to do, I asked, than track down a few measly dollars from a kid working a summer job??
The IRS agent let the silence hang over the phone for a few long moments, then said, with truly frightening relish: "Mr. Garceau, are you suggesting that the IRS is in the business of trying to make people feel uncomfortable?" (You have to imagine the sounds of flesh crackling over an open flame pit and souls melting to a shriek in the background as he says this.)
Well, I laughed nervously and got off the line as soon as possible, promising to never make such a foolish omission in the future. I begged him to spare my children, if ever I had any. Afterward I realized that, as much as Americans are conditioned to fear the IRS and its unspeakable consequences, it is actually possible to find a tax man out there with a sense of humor. But me? I’d still take the Russian Roulette over another conversation with the IRS.