Cebu City Treasurer Jerone Castillo | CDN File Photo
CEBU CITY, Philippines — The Cebu City Treasurer’s Office (CTO) is tapping the assistance of the city’s 80 barangays in monitoring the presence of businesses in their respective jurisdictions.
Lawyer Jerone Castillo, CTO head, said that barangays are in the best position to identify the businesses that they could tax.
“This is where the barangays come in. They are capable of monitoring all businesses in (their) jurisdictions down to the farthest corner,” Castillo said in an interview today, November 5, 2019.
Castillo said there are now around 40, 000 businesses that are operating in Cebu City. All of these businesses needed to be assessed to especially determine if they are paying the right amount of real property taxes.
On their own, Castillo admitted that CTO is incapable of monitoring all business operations in the city.
Since barangays earn a 30 percent share from real property taxes, Castillo is confident that they will be religious in monitoring businesses that are located within their jurisdiction.
“They earn from the RPT. They need to become our partners in making sure the city can collect the right amount of RPTs,” said Castillo.
Castillo said they could easily increase their collection efficiency if they have the support of the barangays.
“As the mayor (Edgardo Labella) said, we don’t need to raise the taxes as it has an inflatory effect. What we need is an effective and efficient tax collection,” he said.
CTO has so far collected P7 billion in taxes since January. But their actual collection is still short of the P8.22 billion collection target for the year.
Next year, Castillo said they plan to increase their collection target to P8.9 billion.
Castillo said is confident that the city’s 2020 collection target can be achieved especially with help of the barangays.
He encourage barangays to come up with a data base of all business that are located in their respective areas. Their data base should include the classification of properties and its fair market value. Said data will help CTO and even the City Assessor’s Office (CAO) in the conduct of tax assessments and collection.
Castillo said that CAO personnel can use the barangays data in their assessment of real properties.
Barangays can also help CTO monitor the actual operation of businesses that are located within their jurisdiction. They are in the best position to determine if businesses are paying the right amount of taxes.
As a long-term plan, Castillo said they wanted to come up with an integrated system that will cater to paperless application, processing and validation of real properties and other business processing needs.
He wanted the barangays included in the integrated system to tap their help especially in the monitoring real properties used for business.
Castillo said that they are now studying the integrated systems now used in Quezon City, Cotabato City, and Pampangga to determine which one would best fit Cebu City’s needs. / dcb