Fact-check

Continuing on his contemptuous rant against the Supreme Court, President Aquino stumbled on the facts. He accused the Court of committing the same “cross-border fund transfers” that it frowned upon in its ruling on DAP.

That is a lie.

Not a single centavo of Court funds was transferred to the DOJ, the latter failing to move quick enough to build urgently needed courthouses. The Court’s P1.8 billion in savings was realigned to the Judiciary’s capital outlay fund and part of that was earmarked to build the Manila Hall of Justice on land titled to the SC.

Like other model halls of justice in Lapulapu and Angeles cities, the construction of the Manila Hall of Justice is under the control and supervision of the SC. In fact, when Budget Secretary Abad offered the Judiciary P100 million from “pooled savings,” the Court issued a resolution rejecting the offer.

Just as well, that offer was rejected. It smacked too much of the “incentive” distributed to senators during the Corona impeachment episode. Had it not, it would have reduced the magistrates to the same embarrassing depths of obsequiousness the senators displayed last Thursday.

In that Senate sideshow, Sen. Drilon went out of his way to say that previous administrations impounded savings as well. The truth is, as former budget secretary Ben Diokno indicates in a statement issued after the hearing, the Reserve Control Account was used by previous administrations to limit budget deficits and savings were not used for funding new programs and projects.

From his very first SONA in 2012, Aquino’s speeches have often been riddled with inaccuracies. He should get a fact-checker for the speech he will deliver next Monday, if only as a gesture of respect for those who will listen to it.

Revenues

All this talk of “savings” in the billions impounded and hastily redeployed in frenzied spending gives the ordinary citizen the impression government has money flowing out of its ears. The reverse is true.

While we added another billion dollars to our sovereign debt, all our revenue agencies have been underperforming. With this administration in legacy mode, frantically building monuments to itself after four years of doing nothing, the budget deficit is expected to hit P43 billion by the third quarter of this year. It could double that by year-end.

The yawning fiscal gap is not helped by growing shortfalls in revenue collection. The BIR, for instance, collected just P94.12 billion this June or 13.37% short of its goal. For the entire first semester, the BIR collected just P643.21 billion or just 44.18% of its full-year target of P1.456 trillion.

The Bureau of Customs (BoC) is in direr straits. It has not met a single collection target for all the first six months of this year.

According to projections used to justify this year’s hefty budget, the BoC is supposed to collect P408.1 billion this year. That will not happen, not with the flimsy performance displayed so far.

The agency’s collection for June was only a paltry P26.97 billion — or a staggering 18% short its revenue target of P33.29 billion for the month. The month before, the BoC was also 18% short of target. For the first six months of the year, the agency fell an average of 12.8% short of expectation.

According to a report prepared by DOF undersecretary Carlo Carag, the continuing deterioration of Customs collections is made more puzzling by the fact that increases were made in the tariff rate, foreign exchange calculations and value assessments of dutiable imports. These ought to have pulled up collections.

The President can no longer repeat what he said of Customs professionals in last year’s SONA. Since then, all the senior district collectors of the agency were exiled into our unique version of the Gulag: the Customs Policy and Research Office (CPRO) under Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima’s watch. The BoC’s frontlines, it seems, are now entirely manned by amateurs.

Incidentally, the CPRO and the new Office for Revenue Agency Modernization (ORAM), said to be the dumping ground for retired generals, were created by mere executive orders, possibly violating Congress’ prerogative. The constitutionality of their existence may be the subject of a petition to the Supreme Court.

We can only hope that Secretary Purisima, said to be the real architect of the DAP, will properly brief his president of the dismal revenue performance ahead of Monday’s SONA — if only to spare the latter more embarrassment from mouthing inaccuracies.

Sin taxes

Of course, increased excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol did add to revenue collections significantly. However, the collections might have added up billions more had revenue agencies been more adept at suppressing illicit tobacco trade.

The past few weeks, nearly all our business associations and foreign chambers of commerce jointly asked government to establish a third-party monitoring group to ensure proper collection of taxes from cigarette manufacturers. Even the largest cigarette manufacturer in the country endorsed the call for a third-party auditing watchdog to help government properly collect the taxes due it.

The spectacle here is not the high level of unanimity expressed by domestic business associations and foreign chambers of commerce. The spectacle here is that all revenue agencies uniformly rejected what seems to be a sound proposal.

There has to be some mischievous reason for this odd situation where business groups seek to help government collect taxes due it and the revenue agencies turn deaf to their proposals.

President  Aquino, whatever cough-inducing brand he smokes, should reach out and talk to the business associations instead of relying on his possibly polluted inner circle.