BIR to probe firms with illegal aliens
THE Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) will run after 19 service providers that employ unregistered foreign workers, and have initial tax discrepancies totaling P1 billion.
In a statement on Monday, the tax bureau said it had created a task force to probe companies that employ foreigners for possible violations of the tax code.
“The list of foreign nationals employed by companies in the Philippines were secured from various government agencies and reconciled against the Alphabetical List submitted by these entities and their withholding tax remittances,” it added.
In an interview, Internal Revenue Commissioner Caesar Dulay said these companies were 19 service providers of foreign workers for the offshore gaming sector, adding that initial estimates showed that they have “a total of P1 billion [in] tax discrepancies.”
According to the bureau, Dulay issued notices to these providers to rectify these discrepancies found and pay the tax due, or they will be investigated and audited.
“If they fight it, that’s another story. We’ll tell them to open their books,” the BIR chief said.
A Department of Finance-led interagency task force is concurrently working to ensure that foreigners employed by the offshore gaming sector are paying income taxes.
The department has estimated that the government is losing about P22 billion annually from uncollected offshore gaming worker income taxes.
After consolidating data from various agencies, the task force has come up with an initial list of some 138,000 foreigners, 54,241 of whom have been given alien employment permits and another 83,760 holding special working permits.
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez 3rd has said those on the list have no taxpayer identification numbers and that their reported salaries were only about P20,000 each monthly, which he described as “ridiculously low.”
Assuming that each foreign worker earns an average of $1,500 a month and is taxed at 25 percent of his or her gross income, Dominguez came up with a rough estimate of P32 billion a year in income taxes to be collected.
