Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno said the Marcos administration’s financing program would ensure fulfillment of its eight-point socio-economic agenda.
Appearing before the Senate finance committee chaired by Senator Juan Edgardo "Sonny" M. Angara to support the proposed 2023 P5.268 trillion national budget, Diokno said stern exercise of fiscal prudence has helped affirm the record high credit rating despite global downgrades.
Diokno, former Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) chairman, said the 2021 revenue collections expanded by 5.2 percent and exceeded the Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC)-approved full year program by 4.3 percent.
Moreover, the January to August 2022 collections posted an 18.1 percent growth compared to the same period in 2021 and exceeded the DBCC-approved program to 7.1 percent.
Earlier, Diokno cited rising investor confidence with the Philippines’ foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows reaching a record USD10.5 billion in 2021. For the first half of 2022, FDI inflows rose by 3.1 percent year-on-year to USD4.6 billion.
With the successful reopening of the economy and robust economic activity, the unemployment rate in July was recorded at 5.2 percent – the lowest since the pandemic hit, he said.
The proposed 2023 budget for the Department of Finance (DOF) and its attached agencies is P30.6-billion proposed budget for 2023.
In his budget presentation, Diokno said the agency's proposed budget included an allocation of some P4 billion for the modernization initiatives of the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Bureau of Customs.
Senator Francis "Tol" N. Tolentino asked Diokno: ”What is now the current status on CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency)? May we know from the Secretary of Finance, during your tenure as Bangko Sentral governor, what happened after these announcements were made?" Diokno said that based on the DOF's completed studies on the matter, transitioning into CBDC "at this time, would not be worthwhile" since current digital payment systems such as Pesonet and Instapay are "working very well" and are found to be reliable for online payments in the country.
Senator Robinhood C. Padilla, asked Diokno if the DOF would collect taxes from the online sellers and suggested to the agency to set categories based on the income of small online entrepreneurs.
“Is it true that you will tax online sellers?...I presume, there should be certain categories, especially for the small online sellers?” Padilla said in Filipino.
In response, Diokno admitted that there was a proposal to tax online sellers based on the value added tax law and in fairness to the physical store sellers who have been paying their taxes to the government.
Senator Raffy Tulfo sought clarification on the Bureau of Internal Revenue’s (BIR) tax system.
He cited BIR’s proposal to tax pedicab drivers, vendors, sari-sari stores and vloggers and asked why the agency is targeting on small-scale entrepreneurs instead of big corporations like the oil companies.
In response, Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) Commissioner Lilia Guillermo denied BIR is targeting on small time entrepreneurs. She said the basic principle of taxation is to be “just and fair” and the agency’s focus is on all taxpayers.
At the end of the budget hearing, Angara announced that his committee would present the DOF budget for budget deliberations on the proposed 2023 national budget at the resumption of the plenary session of the Senate next month.