A Penchant for Tax Evasion

A PENCHANT FOR TAX  EVASION (Press Release)
In  a press release of the Philippine Daily Inquirer dated August 1, 2013,  BIR, through commissioner Kim Henares issued an accusing statement boldly declaring that 90% of  the  country’s 1.7 million self-employed professionals ( i.e. doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, accountants, entertainers ) are tax evaders.  These professionals paid only a total of P 9.8 billion in taxes in 2010.  Ideally these professionals collectively should be paying a total of Php 100 billion in taxes annually. In response to this situation,  BIR issued an order to subject these professionals to an extensive audit in order to determine whether they are paying the correct taxes.  These self-employed professionals, because of their bad habit of evading correct taxes payments, are cheating the Filipino themselves and depriving them of basic public services.  Tax evasion is also very rampant in the business community. Only 105 of the 207-strong member firms and organizations of the Federation of the Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Inc. (FFCCCII) have tax identification numbers ( TIN ), indicating that tax evasion in this country is already widespread in the business sector.  Only 8% of their member-firms of the FFCCCII have paid taxes, only around 50 member-firms have filed income tax returns while more or less 30 of them have filed returns with zero tax due, despite the 6.6% economic growth of the country.
What does this tax scenario tell us?  This indicates that Filipino tax payers have developed this penchant to avoid their tax obligations while they crave to avail of good public services from the government. Perhaps the famous saying of the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy can be aptly applied to us, to quote him saying “Ask not what your government can do for you but what you can do for your government.”  We Filipinos have the propensity to avail and enjoy better government services such as  : quality education and adequate  classrooms for our kids, world-class healthcare services,  cheaper electricity and low transportation fares due to low-cost energy supply,  better infrastructure programs (i.e. public roads & highways, etc) but we do not want to contribute our respective incomes to make them resounding realities for our people. We cannot blame the government if there are  shortages of classrooms for our students, bad healthcare services, rugged roads and dilapidated bridges, high electricity and transportation fares if we ourselves, Filipino taxpayers, do not want to contribute our economic shares of the economic pie by religiously paying our taxes.  We have a democratically elected government that promises to eradicate corruption at all levels of government. However, we cannot expect it to deliver much-needed basic public services to our people, especially to the marginalized and destitute sector of our society if we do not have a strong commitment to pay our tax obligations to enable our government to  perform its mandate which of serving the Filipino people and make this country  a better place to live in for future generations of Filipinos.  As the proverbial saying goes, “ we cannot make our cake and eat it too just like a cost-free economic pie, but we have to pay the price so that all Filipinos can proportionately take part in enjoying the gobbling up of our economic cake.