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TRUE to his promise, House Speaker Prospero Nograles on Wednesday
said he will ask President Gloria Arroyo to certify as urgent
several tax relief measures, as he declared the House of
Representatives will prioritize deliberations on House Bill 3971
which seeks to increase personal tax exemptions for individual tax
payers.
This developed after the House committee on Ways
and Means chaired by Antique Rep. Exequiel Javier brought his
committee report to the plenary for debate and amendments.
“I commend chairman Exequiel Javier and
members of the House ways and means committee for expediting the
substitute bill’s committee approval because of the urgency of
giving tax relief to our people in the wake of the global economic
crunch,” Nograles said.
Under HB 3971, the personal exemption of single
individuals, or those married but legally separated with no
qualified dependents, head of family, and for each married
individual would be pegged at P50,000 from the current exemption of
P20,000, P25,000 and P32,000, respectively. Dependents not exceeding
four would be increased to P25,000 each from the current amount of
P8,000 each.
Javier said HB 3971 is a substitute bill
consolidating some 20 separate but related measures proposing to
amend certain provisions of Republic Act 8424, the National Internal
Revenue Code of 1997.
Likewise, the Javier panel is also finalizing at
the committee a companion tax measure called the Simplified Net
Income Taxation under HB 1809, authored by Deputy Speaker Eric
Singson, which would simplify the taxation of self-employed
individuals.
Singson, in his explanatory note said that
“after six years [since 1998] of implementing the 1997 Tax Reform
Law [RA 8424], income collections from self-employed grew by only
6.77 percent versus 19.86 percent prior to the effectivity of the
Comprehensive Tax Reform Package.
“It can only be deduced that the so-called
‘hard-to-tax’ groups do not report items of income, do not issue
receipts, over-charge their allowable deductions, or do not file
income tax at all,” Singson
said, adding that only 2.6 percent of income
taxes come from
the ‘hard-to-tax’ groups while fixed income
or compensation earners account for 97.4 percent of the total
individual taxes collected by government.
On the other hand, authors of HB 3971 said it
has been ten years since the last adjustment on personal and
additional exemptions were granted to individual taxpayers.
-- Sammy Martin
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