Intensified tax drive seen to fund Tom’s P7.2B budget

City Budget Officer Marietta Gumia outlines their tax collection drive to the council. (CDN Photo/Junjie Mendoza)

THE administration of Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña will intensify its tax collection efforts to fund next year’s P7.2 billion budget, its finance officials said in yesterday’s start of the City Council budget hearings.

City Budget Officer Marietta Gumia explained to the City Council’s budget committee that they intend to collect more real property, business and other taxes.

“Due to this proposal which we pushed, we will be having a tax mapping program from real property taxes (RPT) with the city assessor and the city treasurer’s office,” she said.

Gumia said the executive department included a budget proposal of P3.2 million for job order (JOs) personnel for tax mapping of business establishments and another P3.4 million for JOs for tax mapping of real properties.

In her presentation, Gumia said they raised their target collection of P1.2 billion in real property taxes this year to P1.66 billion by next year.

For business tax, they target to collect P1.5 billion by next year, an increase of P300 million from their target of P1.2 billion this year.

For other local taxes, the city also targets to collect P1.3 billion next year, higher than this year’s P1 billion target.

But City Councilor Jose Daluz III, a member of the council’s budget and finance committee, is skeptical on the proposal.

“Frankly speaking, we’ve been hearing about plans for tax mapping every budget hearing, every year,” he said.

Cebu City Treasurer Tessie Camarillo was supposed to explain the collection targets for 2017 and their revenue collection report for this year during yesterday’s hearing.
But problems on the documents and time constraints forced the council to reschedule the discussion today.

Reporters managed to secure a copy of the city treasurer’s office (CTO) revenue collection from January to September this year.

Based on the report, the CTO is still at 59 percent on their tax revenue collection.

Camarillo was appointed City Treasurer after Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña won in the May 2016 elections.

The targets were prepared by former city treasurer Diwa Cuevas who is also responsible for the collection during the first half of the year.

Reporters tried to ask Camarillo to explain the figures in their collection report but she refused, saying she will just do so during today’s continuation of the budget hearing.