The Daily Tribune Mr. Expose' 01.27.09

The Daily Tribune
Dismiss Resado

MR. EXPOSE
Amb. Ernesto Maceda
01/27/2009
Based on his admissions at the House of Representatives hearings last Friday, State Prosecutor John Resado should be charged with tax evasion, doing lending operation..........

Solita Monsod confirms.. Last Wednesday, we wrote that the major cause of BIR’s P60-billion shortfall in its 2008 collections is the failure to pay taxes properly by telecom, cigarette and liquor companies. Former Neda Director General Solita Collas-Monsod, a senior professor of Economics at UP, supplies the details on sin tax evasions. She wrote in her Philippine Daily Inquirer column of Saturday, Jan. 25, the following: “There is one very simple action they can take, which would take at most five minutes of their time: Just remove the poison pill provision that was inserted in the law in 1997 by the bicameral conference committee (it wasn’t in the original bill). In effect, the provision keeps the classification of the tobacco and alcohol products nailed to what they were as of Oct. 1, 1996, “until revised by Congress.” Henceforth, the classification should be based on current net retail prices, as explicitly defined in the tax code, and not prices obtaining 12 years ago!

“The poison pill provision, innocuous as it looks and sounds, has cost the government tons of money in lost revenues, already estimated at something like P20 billion a year by then Finance Secretary Lito Camacho, way back in 2002, just on cigarettes alone. That amount would have to be much larger six years later. It must be pointed out, that the P20 billion in lost revenues is not just because of the freezing of the classifications to 1996 prices. The loss is also due to the rampant under declaration of production — and whistle-blower Elpidio Que has documents purporting to show that for alcohol products, only 10 percent of the actual value of transactions are being reported for tax purposes. The figure is even lower for cigarettes.”

The billions that cigarette and liquor companies contribute to presidential campaigns are a drop in the bucket of the taxes they have evaded. Attention please, Commissioner Sixto Esquivias IV.

Problems, problems. GMA’s problems are piling up by the day. Besides the critical remarks of President Barack Obama and the adverse World Bank report on corruption in road contracts, now comes the withdrawal by the French firm Suez Energy from its offer to buy the Calaca power plant in Batangas for $787 million, ..........