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By Euan Paulo C. Añonuevo, Reporter
THE government may use revenues from the
expanded value-added tax (E-VAT) on oil to subsidize the transport
sector.
Finance Secretary Margarito Teves said that a
task force has already been organized “to study how to apportion
the additional revenues from E-VAT.”
He said that it will be up to the task force to
decide how to allocate the revenues if it decided to do this, as the
Department of Finance’s task would solely be “to make sure that
this additional revenue would be available.”
The government earns about P4 billion every
quarter as windfall from the E-VAT meted on oil, the price of which
has broken record levels since the start of the year.
A number of countries in the region including
China, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Bangladesh have already been
forced to grant subsidies and rebates to their transport sectors and
low-income groups because of high crude prices that have pushed fuel
and food prices up.
Malacañang earlier implemented a P500 subsidy
for households consuming less than 100 kilowatts of electricity a
month.
But various groups have been calling on the
government to instead scrap taxes imposed on oil to temper rising
prices at the pump, which have almost doubled from the previous
year.
Teves said the Finance department is partial to
continuing the E-VAT to subsidize the poor, but admitted that
lawmakers have the prerogative to take back this tax.
“Our own preference is to continue
implementing it because we need it very badly to help the very poor
who are suffering from this development specifically [the] typhoon
and the oil prices. We need to immediately address their needs,”
he said.
Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes said it would be
better to use the revenues for converting vehicles so they may run
on compressed natural gas or liquefied petroleum gas.
“There is already a P1-per-liter subsidy being
given by oil companies on top of the benefits that the transport
groups have been getting from the oil firms such as scholarship and
housing programs,” he said.
He said that the transport sector would rather
have a financing scheme with lower rates and longer tenors that
would allow members to shift to cheaper and cleaner alternative
fuels, which would provide a long term solution to rising oil
prices.
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