Revenue collection is on track to hit the government's full-year target this year driven by the Bureau of Customs’ better than expected performance, data from the Bureau of the Treasury showed.

Based on the Treasury report on Tuesday, Dec. 27, total revenues reached P3.277 billion from January to November, shy by only 0.7 percent to meet the full-year goal of P3.3 trillion.

The end-November revenue haul was also 18 percent higher compared with P2.774 trillion in the same period last year.

Taxes contributed 90 percent to the total, while the remaining 10 percent were from non-tax sources.

According to the Treasury, the improved revenue was due to the Customs’ collections, which surpassed its P721.5 billion target by 9.4 percent to P789.2 billion

Customs’ resulting first 11-month uptake similarly rose 35 year-on-year from P583.3 billion.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Internal Revenue raised P2.156 trillion in January to November, up 12 percent compared with P1.915 trillion in the same period last year.

Earlier, Finance Secretary Benjamin E. Diokno said the budget deficit this year may fall below ceiling due to higher than expected revenue collections of its two main tax agencies.

Diokno said the fiscal deficit as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) had settled at only 6.5 percent in the first nine months of the year, way below the 7.6 percent full-year program

“The government has ramped up efforts to maintain fiscal discipline through its revenue agencies, which have surpassed their programmed collections for 2022,” Diokno said.

Diokno also expressed confidence that revenue collections will surpass pre-pandemic levels this year, in light of higher economic activity that is supported by effective tax administration.

At end-November, the government’s fiscal deficit amounted to P1.236 trillion, seven percent lower than last year’s P1.332 trillion tally.

Likewise, the budget gap t was only 75 percent of the Marcos administration’s full-year ceiling of 1.7 trillion.

To sustain these hard-earned gains, the government is implementing the country’s first-ever Medium-Term Fiscal Framework (MTFF). This serves as the country’s blueprint for fiscal sustainability for the next six years.

The Framework proposes measures that will improve tax administration, enhance the fairness and efficiency of the tax system, and promote sustainability to address climate change.

The fiscal strategy will help bring down the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio to less than 60 percent by 2025, and further down to 51 percent by 2028. Furthermore, it will cut the deficit-to-GDP ratio to 3 percent by 2028.