VECO owes city P207M in taxes

CEBU, Philippines — The Cebu City Assessor’s Office has issued the Visayan Electric Company (VECO) a notice of assessment over unpaid real property taxes amounting to P207 million.

Acting City Assessor Raul Bito-on said the amount represents VECO’s old and new declarations of “due and demandable” real property taxes.

Under the old declaration, VECO needed to pay the city P73,881,656.81, representing electrical posts and machineries like office equipment from 1989 to 2019 and from 1992 to 2019.

These were reportedly assessed way back in 1992.

A recent assessment, meanwhile, found that VECO has not paid real property taxes for 35,249 electrical posts and 7,491 transformers as early as 1975 amounting to P134,274,302.85. This amount reportedly includes 10 years’ worth of back taxes.

“Under the Local Government Code, any real property assessed for the first time can only be assessed penalties up to 10 years. Even if these properties have been there way back 1996 or even before 1975 pa, we can only assess it for the past 10 years. That’s the provision of the law,” Bito-on said.

He said the Supreme Court have ruled since 2007 that power firms are not exempt from taxes.

“For a while, itong mga electric cooperatives, power companies, they have been saying na they are exempt from taxes but since 2007, there have been Supreme Court decisions that they are not exempted,” Bito-on said.

VECO Reputation Enhancement Manager Quennie Sanchez-Bronce told The Freeman they are awaiting the ruling of the Energy Regulatory Commission on whether or not real property taxes should be passed on to customers.

“As a responsible business entity and a trusted electric utility, VECO is working with the city government to resolve the payment of our real property taxes,” Bronce said.

Bito-on said he does know why the City Treasurer’s Office failed to collect the taxes in previous years.

He said that when he assumed office last October 2018, a series of assessments were undertaken to ensure that all companies are not under-declaring their real property taxes.

He hopes that the incoming administration will continue his office’s work.

“Automatically, it’s incumbent upon them to enforce this obligation ni VECO and that burden, unfortunately, falls on the lap of the Treasurer’s Office. Ang mandate ng Assessor’s Office is only to assess while the Treasurer’s Office will collect,” he said.

Meanwhile, mayor-elect Edgardo Labella said he has no plans of increasing the taxes in the city but he will impose an efficient collection of real property taxes.

“We’ve got to have the tax mapping but also the tax profiling,” Labella said.

He said all properties in the city should be profiled to ensure that all of them are declaring their taxes properly. (FREEMAN)