EDITORIAL - A crying shame

Here is a very disturbing piece of news. According to finance secretary Cesar Purisima, self-employed people such as businessmen and professionals, among them doctors and lawyers, paid an average of only P5,800 in income taxes last year.

“It does not make sense when you compare it with the average payments of those who are employed. It’s unbelievable,” Purisima said. Being unbelievable and not making sense is a mild way of putting it. It is disgusting. It is a crying shame.

It is one of the great tragedies of our time that an employed person, whose only means of enjoying “luxurious” dining would be to bring his family to a fastfood outlet, would be paying more taxes than those who find it normal and ordinary to have breakfast at five star hotels.

But the unbelievably small and inappropriate amount of income taxes that businessmen, doctors and lawyers pay is only half of what makes this piece of news disturbing. The other half is that it is hardly news. It is in fact old hat.

This is not something whose shock value comes from being new and heretofore undisclosed. Its true shock value comes from the fact that it is something widely known but whose reemergence in the news can only suggest one thing — government has not done anything to stop it.

Therefore, it is not enough for Purisima to just be incredulous. It is not even enough for him to just be outraged and scandalized. He should do something about it. In fact he should run right away to his boss to tell him the bad news. 

If Purisima is truly on board Noynoy Aquino’s bandwagon, he should be a bearer of bad news for a change. He should tell the president like it is because, for all we know, he could be clueless about this ongoing rip-off that is costing government billions in unpaid taxes.

If Noynoy is not merely engaged in sloganeering with his “daang matuwid” and “kung walang kurap walang mahirap” mantras, then this issue could provide him the golden opportunity to prove to all and sundry that he truly means business.

Interestingly, many of those who cheat on their taxes formed the backbone of support for Noynoy in the elections. It would be “baluktot na daan” for Noynoy to do nothing about those who earn more and pay so much less “dahil alam niya na kakurapan ang dahilan kung bakit ganyan.”