By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
Variety News Staff

SENATOR Ben Pangelinan, D-Barrigada, yesterday introduced a bill that would require the Department of Administration to make an automatic deposit of income tax collections into the Income Tax Refund Efficient Payment Trust Fund immediately after they were received to ensure the availability of cash for tax refunds.
The current law gives DOA 10 days at the end of each month to put the tax collections into the Trust Fund, but Pangelinan said he had discovered that once monies reached the general fund, the percentage set aside for income tax refunds never made it to the Trust Fund.
The government estimates that it owes taxpayers $18.7 million in tax refunds, and $119.6 million in corporate tax refunds as of July last year. It’s not known how much of these obligations have since been paid off.
“Undoubtedly, the issue of paying income tax refunds has been a perennial problem for quite some time.  People are still owed their 2004 returns and it’s unfortunate that they have to beg for something that belongs to them,” Pangelinan said in introducing Bill 53.
The bill proposes that every time an income tax payment is made, a portion of every tax payment received by the government would be calculated by multiplying the payment by the amount set forth in the provision for tax refunds divided by the total income taxes adopted in the annual fiscal year budget passed by the Legislature.
“It has always been my belief that income tax refunds are overpayments made by both individual and corporate taxpayers and that because it’s not the government’s money, they should hold funds in a trust that pays out these overpayments on a timely and consistent manner,” he added.
Pangelinan urged his colleagues to act on the bill with “all deliberate haste.”