BIR-S. Leyte finds lots of old, unused receipts

MAASIN CITY, Philippines -- The new regulation implemented by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) for business firms to print a new set original receipts has yielded at least seven truckloads of voluminous, termite-smelling original receipts (OR) the BIR discarded in the city's garbage dump.

"In other places, 1990s receipts are still used. In our province, some of those disposed OR have dates as far back as 2002," said Alexander Laroza, revenue district officer of Revenue Office 90, in a PIA-Southern Leyte report recently.

This confirmed the suspicion that some businesses were still using old receipts to minimize their computation of current tax dues, and that was the main reason why the BIR issued a new policy for the issuance of freshly-printed receipts enforced this year, Laroza said.

Old receipts have until August 30 this year as deadline to be used, but this was extended until October 31 under certain conditions, and also because of requests from the business sector, Laroza said.

He however said that, as a general guide, those printed in 2012 and earlier should no longer be used, under pain of P 50,000 penalty for violators, and by this time new receipts should be issued.

Likewise, businesses have a grace period of ten days to surrender old receipts, starting from the day they presented to the BIR the new ones, he said.

Laroza said that around the province, over 4,000 businesses are expected to comply with the requirement on new OR, and about 80 percent of them have actually complied, while there were still those asking for more time.

The latest set of newly-printed ORs can be validly used for a period of five years, Laroza added. (FREEMAN)