Gerry D. Dumayas, Bureau of Internal Revenue assistant regional director during Monday’s Kapehan sa Dabaw. (Ace R. Morandante/davaotoday.com)
DAVAO CITY— The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) encouraged taxpayers to use the electronic filing (e-filing) of their income tax this early to avoid data traffic or delay by the long queue for manual filing.
Gerry D. Dumayas, BIR assistant regional director has reminded taxpayers of the nearing deadline on April 15 of the filing of income tax, as he pointed to the ease of e-filing as the easiest and fastest method.
Simplicio D. Cabantac, Jr. of Regional District Office (RDO) 13 East Davao said, “there are almost 19,000 filers in the job orders alone from government agencies.”
“We don’t have to wait for hours and take the long process during deadlines just to file our income tax returns,” said Dumayas.
But Dumayas also requested taxpayers to avoid filing during the deadline “because definitely you will encounter a data traffic and maybe the system might not accommodate taxpayers anymore.”
Dumayas said they increased their bandwidth to accommodate more taxpayers and to avoid data traffic like what happened last year when the low bandwidth caused heavy data traffic.
Dumayas warned that there are corresponding penalties for those late income tax filers. “If you have payables then you are charged 25 percent plus its interest on how many days you failed to file and then we still have compromised penalty, “ Dumayas said.
E- filing clinics for taxpayers
BIR will conduct a tax clinic for eight days at the SM City Ecoland starting on March to accommodate questions and give assistance to the taxpayers. The tax clinic was arranged by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).
Dumayas reminded that the BIR would not allow taxpayers to do e-filing during the clinic since “according to the memo, there will be only two laptops available during the clinic.”
“There are still a lot of taxpayers who don’t know how to file online,” Dumayas said.
The tax clinic goal is to teach taxpayers the process how to file online.
Dumayas said that “during the kick-off, it took a taxpayer less than 10 minutes to file and pay in the bank online.”
BIR will also distribute fliers and e-BIR forms through compact disk (CD) to the taxpayers during the tax clinic.
RDO Cresencio A. Agad of West Davao Revenue District, said that the outcome of the tax clinic on March 18 will be the basis if the BIR can’t accommodate all the taxpayers during the clinic.
“If we will put up another tax clinics other that SM it depends from the outcome on the clinic,” Agad said. (davaotoday.com)
