More tax revenues from POGOs seen
Credit to Author: MAYVELIN U. CARABALLO, TMT| Date: Tue, 06 Aug 2019 16:56:16 +0000
Other service providers of offshore gaming industry are expected to remit the monthly withholding taxes of foreign workers to the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) on or before August 10.
“August 10 is deadline for the monthly remittance of withholding tax on compensation,” BIR Deputy Commissioner Arnel Guballa said in a message on Tuesday.
Under BIR rules, employers have to remit withholding taxes from their workers on the 10th day after the end of the previous month.
“Six companies initially remitted, [but] others will follow,” Guballa said.
Guballa earlier reported that out of 248 service providers of the Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGO), six has already remitted P200 million in withholding taxes to the bureau for the month of July.
It can be recalled the tax bureau reported it had already issued an initial 10,000 tax identification numbers to POGO workers after issuing notices to employers.
The POGO sector has been the subject of government scrutiny after investigations revealed it has become a conduit for undocumented workers from China.
Since they are undocumented, these foreign workers are also not paying taxes to the government.
The BIR said it had matched the list of foreigners hired by local companies with records provided by government agencies, which showed big discrepancies on the number of foreigners employed and reported by them to the bureau.
Most of these foreign workers, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez 3rd had said, are from the POGO industry, to which the government is losing about P2 billion a month for every 100,000 foreign workers.
At P2 billion a month, the amount of taxes to be collected from the industry would hit P24 billion a year — a revenue source that was non-existent some four of five years ago, before President Duterte handed over control of these POGO companies to the state-run Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor).
For its part, Pagcor earlier called for the fair implementation of government rules on the offshore gaming sector as the agency is bullish on hitting its P8-billion target revenue from the industry this year.