THE collection target of the Customs bureau this year has been lowered by P89 billion, from from P498.67 billion to P409 billion, according to the agency’s public information office.
The revision of the collection goal came after some district collectors reportedly asked the Department of Finance and the Development Budget Coordination Committee to lower the target to make it doable and enable them to achieve the target.
The collectors said the DBCC, an interagency that sets the target of the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the BoC, should consider setting monthly revenue targets attainable by every collection district.
The recalculation followed continuous decline in oil prices and imports levels in recent months.
This new target is 17.6 percent lower than the original cash collection target of P488.7 billion, as indicated in the 2016 Budget Expenditures and Sources of Financing (BESF), originally set using the computation methodology of two-year actual average cash collections by type and source of tax of 2014 and 2015.
The recomputed cash collection target remains higher by 12.6 percent compared to the 2015 actual cash collection of P357.4 billion.
With the bureau’s actual first six months collection reaching P190.6 billion, the remaining amount to be collected for this year to reach the new target is P218.4 billion.
Given this revision, the total target for the year to be reached by each of the 17 ports are:
Port of San Fernando (P2.1 billion); Port of Manila (P66.9 billion); Manila International Container Port (P121.3 billion); Ninoy Aquino International Airport (P36.1 billion); Batangas (P92.3 billion); Legaspi (P201 million); Iloilo (P2.1 billion); Cebu (P17.2 billion);
Tacloban (P164.3 million); Surigao (P10.4 billion); Cagayan de Oro (P9.8 billion); Zamboanga (P186 million); Davao (P11.3 billion); Subic (P15.1 billion); Clark (P1.4 billion); Aparri (P242.8 million) and Limay (P26.2 billion).
For the first half of the year, the bureau collected only P190.27 billion out of its P238.32-billion target, for a P48.05-billion shortfall.
Customs officials said several factors accounted for the shortfall, which included the international trade, peso fluctuation, and leakages from smuggling and corruption.
With the revised collection goal, district collectors are hopeful in meeting the assigned target.
