BOC aiming for close to P1 trillion in collections this year
The Bureau of Customs (BOC), the government's second-largest tax agency, is poised to surpass its revenue target this year, potentially hitting a record of nearly P1 trillion.
Assistant Commissioner and Spokesperson Vincent Philip Maronilla said the BOC’s internal target is to exceed its 2024 goal by between P20 billion and P30 billion, bringing it closer to the P1 trillion mark for this year.
The Customs bureau is expected to collect around P959 billion in revenues in 2024, but with the agency’s ambitious internal target, this figure could potentially be raised to P989 billion.
“We're aiming to exceed the official target by an additional P20 to P30 billion for the entire year. Hopefully, we will achieve slightly below P1 trillion. If we can reach a trillion, even better, Maronilla told reporters on the sidelines of the ATA Carnet launching.
If their internal target is realized, the BOC could attain a 12 percent revenue increase by year-end. Earlier, Recto said he hopes that the BOC will attain a double-digit percentage increase for 2024.
The Marcos administration set the projection for tax revenues to hit P4.3 trillion this year, wherein bulk or P3.5 trillion will come from the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the rest from
the Customs.
Maronilla also said that the Customs is still on track to hit the target for this month and for the year, but noted that the target for next month may be hindered by the inventory period of some businesses.
“Our problem, I think, would start about next month lang naman because of the ghost month. August has been pegged as a slow month. Some businessmen and some trading partners superstitiously treat it as a slow month and some treat it as an inventory month for the year,” he said.
“But for the month of July, we're very much confident that we will hit it. It's a matter of how many surplus we're going to be able to create to add on to our goal of having a year-end double-digit surplus,” he added.
The BOC has so far collected P456.053 billion from January to June, up by 5.22 percent from the record in 2023.
Meanwhile, last year, it collected around P884 billion, which represents a 2.46 percent increase from the P862.41 billion collected in 2022.
Top smuggled commodities
The BOC official also said that it seized smuggled goods with a combined value of P20 billion in the first six months of the year, which he said was more than already half from last year.
Goods with intellectual property rights remain the most smuggled commodity, followed by agricultural products and tobacco.
“The products that's with the most reward when you smuggle it are the excisable ones. So we're concentrating on those and we're, of course, on items that socially are unacceptable for us to be able to import and proliferate in the society,” he said.