Finance Secretary Margarito Teves has urged members of Congress to put back in the nation’s coffers every peso that had been taken away by legislative fiat, or risk budget imbalance seen restored by 2013, a government press release said.

“We’ve got to get Congress to stop adopting those revenue-eroding measures and restore the losses. We are seeking their cooperation in this regard,” Teves said.

“In the future, there should at least be one peso added to the Treasury for every peso that they take away,” he  said.

His most recent complaint against the legislators concerned  the plan to exempt the remittance transactions of overseas Filipino remittance beneficiaries from the documentary stamp tax or DST.

Such transactions cost beneficiaries 30-centavos in DST for every P200 worth of remittance sent by working principals around the world.

International fugitive and Senator Panfilo Lacson first proposed the measure last year and Senator Juan Ponce Enrile took it up again in his absence in recent months.

Lacson argued DST collection account for just 3.4 percent of total tax take each year by the BIR and it could safely forego on this particular revenue source as a service to hardworking OFWs.

Enrile took it up again in the aftermath of the devastation wrought on the lives of OFW beneficiary families in Luzon by tropical storms Ondoy and Pepeng late last year.

Close to being spent but still able to report that the nation’s budgetary woes can be managed effectively, Teves pleaded for sobriety among legislators whenever they think of reducing the Filipino taxpayer’s burden.

Teves said the taxman’s job, in this case relating to Bureau of Internal Revenue chief Joel Tan-Torres, “is a very difficult job to handle” without Congress making it worse through revenue-eroding measures it loves to pass every now and then, the press release said.

He credited the BIR for increasing its tax take in December by 19.9 percent, considering that the economy grew by just three or four percent in nominal terms during the period.

The BIR collected P68.4 billion in December last year or well above the year ago collection of just P57 billion as the agency’s revenue-enhancement measures began to bite.*PNA

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