Business World
THE BUREAU of Internal Revenue (BIR) plans to reduce manual intervention in the preparation of its lists of top taxpayers, as it admitted last weekend that the first version of its 2009 ranking of individual taxpayers had "human errors."
BIR Commissioner Kim S. Jacinto-Henares said by phone yesterday that the bureau plans to adopt a system that will involve "less human intervention" in drawing up the list.
Ms. Jacinto-Henares said the plan is a "priority project" under the bureau’s P600-million electronic Tax Information System program next year. "Of course, with that system, errors will be lessened because they (encoders) would just have to scan the documents, unlike now when they are actually typing it (data) one by one," she explained.
The new list, released last Dec. 18, removed individuals Rosabelle C. Bandong and Francis Carlo D. Taparan, who had been in second and fourth places, respectively. They were ranked as such after BIR’s data encoders misread their income tax data and reflected their tax payments for 2009 as P57.8 million and P38.7 million, respectively, when these should have been only in the thousands, Ms. Jacinto-Henares said.
Correction of the list caused others to move up, as well as new inclusions at the bottom, particularly Ma. Lourdes B. Sison (499th with P3.566 million) and Hitoshi Goto (500th, P3.565 million).
The erroneous entries came just before the bureau was to reshuffle data encoders of its 123 revenue district offices next month in order "to prevent familiarity with their clients," Ms. Jacinto-Henares said. "We are reshuffling because these people have been in their places for a very, very long time now...This [incident] just justifies...the plan," she said.
The movements will be done in two phases, Ms. Jacinto-Henares said, with the first one starting next month and ending in June, and the second during the second half. -- PPM
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