THE Philippine Bureau of Customs (BOC) recorded in July this year’s single biggest monthly collection deficit of P6.9 billion. This is the fourth month in a row of shortfalls experienced by the agency.
In July, BOC took in P21.5 billion against its target of P28.44 billion, mainly as a result of the failure of the so-called billionaire ports — particularly Manila International Container Port (MICP), Port of Manila (POM), and the Port of Batangas in the south of Manila – from meeting their targets.
Customs commissioner Angelito Alvarez said, “The volume of oil is not there yet because of Shell’s temporary slowdown of imports. But I think we will recover by this August.
“Come August, we expect our revenue collections to increase toward the end of December. It is the trend that we saw last year… (revenue) collections start picking up in August.”
From January to July, BOC’s cash collection amounted to P150.05 billion compared with its P170.07-billion target, leading to a gap of P20.73 billion.
Alvarez said the duty-free importation of about 2,000 products, under various trade agreements entered into by the government, added to the agency’s failure to meet collection goals.
For the first half of the year, the total dutiable value of imports shrank more than a quarter to P531.1 billion from P710.8 billion in the same period last year.
In terms of dutiable volume, imports dropped 49% to 10.4 million tons from last year’s 20.4 million tons.
Total volume was almost flat at 28.8 million tons from the previous year’s 28.1 million tons.
For the first half, Batangas port registered the biggest shortfall of P5.61 billion, followed by MICP’s P5.06 billion, and POM’s P3.44 billion.
Batangas took in P23.75 billion against its P29.37-billion goal, MICP P33.39 billion against P38.456, and POM P28.15 billion vis-à-vis P31.6 billion.
