THE Department of Finance (DOF) has called on the Bureau of Immigration (BI) to team up with the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor), as well as law-enforcement agencies in weeding out illegal foreign workers in the country.
This, after the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) reported last week that it had initially uncovered some 12,000 foreign nationals without the necessary work permits employed in various establishments, most of them from Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (Pogos).
In a recent meeting with members of the interagency task force created to monitor and list down the number of foreign nationals working in the country, Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III learned that out of 148 establishments employing around 37,000 workers that were inspected so far, 12,000 foreign nationals in 33 Pogos lacked the necessary permits from the BI and the DOLE.
The finance chief, who wants personal income taxes (PIT) collected from foreign nationals employed by Pogo, said that the BI, Pagcor, DOLE and law-enforcement agencies such as the Philippine National Police (PNP) and National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) should get their act together to weed out illegal aliens working in the country.
“Why don’t we step on the gas here? As I’ve told you last time, BIR [Bureau of Internal Revenue] has a job to do, to collect taxes. For them to be effective, everybody else has to contribute to their effectivity,” Dominguez said.
He said he will inform President Duterte about the outcome of the meeting and report that “we are making progress, but not fast enough.”
Dominguez told the BI’s Deputy Commissioner Atty. Tobias M. Javier to prioritize the rounding up of the 12,000 illegal aliens after finding out that the bureau was only able to arrest 393 illegal foreign workers last year.
“For the next meeting, we would like to see movement on the
assessment; we would like to see
inspections and closure of establishments with illegal foreign workers. So we’d
like to see progress. And you know, if there are 12,000 that you found, there
must be a lot more, a lot more who are floating around. This is a crime. It’s a
violation of the law,” he added.
Guballa’s report
Meanwhile, BIR Deputy Commissioner Arnel S.D. Guballa also reported that the initial raw data showing 138,000 working permits issued to foreign nationals—as collated from various offices—had been trimmed to 122,397 foreign workers and will be subject to further validation, after checking for duplications.
Guballa said that from the cleaned-up list, the BIR has so far assessed 19 out of the 204 Pogo service providers registered with Pagcor.
The BIR’s computations show a final withholding tax assessment of P1.4 billion combined for these 19 taxpayers for 2018 alone, with the 19 assessed being given the standard 10 days to reply to the assessments.