Finance studying three types of tax amnesty measures

Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said Tuesday the government is studying three kinds of tax amnesty programs.

Dominguez said these programs would include amnesty for the estate taxes, amnesty for those who were remiss in paying their taxes and amnesty for those who had tax cases.

“There are three kinds of amnesty we want. We want to give an amnesty for the estate taxes that were not paid so that assets will become developable. Second, we want amnesty for those who have not paid the correct taxes in the past, and that will be based most likely on your total declared assets,” he said.

“You’ll know if you paid the right taxes and we’ll not ask you what you did not pay. Based on your assets, you’ll pay this amount and we’ll not look anymore into your account,” Dominguez said.

He said the third amnesty would cover those who had cases. “We’ll just request the authority from Congress to settle it below what is allowable in the law,” he said.

Dominguez said the Congress could be aware of the fact that amnesty should not be used too often, adding the country had about two or three amnesties in the past and “I think this should be the last.”

Dominguez said collection from tax amnesty programs should be “quite significant”.

“It’s not so much the amount, it’s the fact that we start with a clean slate. I think everybody should start with clean slate,” he said.

Dominguez said a part of the legislation should be the relaxation of bank secrecy law in cases where there would be a suspicion of money laundering or tax evasion.

He said earlier the DoF was studying the possibility of declaring a tax amnesty program “sometime in the future” especially when the government identified and successfully prosecuted tax evaders in the country.

He said it was important that people took seriously the government’s campaign against tax evasion.

“I said we will consider the tax amnesty sometime in the future. You know there is a psychological effect here. If you declare a tax amnesty and they are not afraid of you, they will not give you any money right?,” Dominguez said in a previous interview.

“So here, they have to know that we are capable of going after people who are tax cheats. So that’s when we will announce the tax amnesty, if we feel that people are taking us seriously,” Dominguez said.

He said the declaration of a tax amnesty could be done either by legislation or through an executive order.