MANILA, Philippines — The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) is studying the possibility of extending the deadline for the registration of online sellers, as well as easing the penalties for small online businesses with past dues.
Heeding the call of lawmakers, BIR Commissioner Caesar Dulay said the BIR would consider moving the deadline for the registration of online businesses, which is set at July 31 under Revenue Memorandum Circular (RMC) 60-2020.
“We will study that seriously,” Dulay said during a House ways and means committee hearing. “Before the deadline, we may come up with some new circulars on this.”
During the same hearing, BIR deputy commissioner Arnel Guballa said the bureau may also consider to abate penalties on past dues to encourage small businesses to register.
“Maybe we can do it case-to-case. For small (businesses), the commissioner can always waive or abate the penalties,” he said.
The BIR reiterated that RMC 60-2020 was issued to determine the total population of online sellers in the Philippines, especially now that Filipinos are adopting digital transactions at a faster pace due to the pandemic.
But even before, the agency issued RMC 55-2013, which reminded those engaged in online transactions of their tax obligations.
Guballa said there had been online sellers who registered with the BIR since the circular was issued until now. However, he said the BIR has no data on how much the government has collected from online merchants.
“We don’t have an industry code. That’s why we can’t capture in our data system how much we collected,” he said.
“As of now, we are working on it, we are manually retrieving (the data on) how many or how much we collected from 2013 up to now.”
Meanwhile, BIR also maintained that it is not looking to tax small online business owners, but rather the large corporations engaged in digital transactions, including non-resident firms.
Upon questioning by House ways and means committee chairman Joey Salceda, Guballa said Netflix, Lazada, Grab and Shopee are already registered with the BIR.
In a text message to reporters, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez also said multinational digital service providers must be registered with the BIR if they want to do business here in the Philippines.
He said the representative office of foreign tech firms, including Facebook, Google and Amazon, are already compliant with this requirement.
Dominguez reiterated that the DOF, together with the BIR, is developing a system that would allow the government to collect value-added tax (VAT) from online sellers and digital service providers.
“We are planning to roll this as soon as possible,” he said.