The Bureau of Customs (BOC) is poised to start next month its nationwide crackdown against oil firms who refuse to comply with the government’s mandatory fuel-marking policy.
At a news briefing in Malacañang on Wednesday, Customs Assistant Commissioner Vincent Maronilla announced they will start going after erring firms after February 9, 2020.
“We have already warned them that if they don’t comply by February 9, 2020, then whatever stock that they have which is unmarked, we will confiscate. We will consider it is as fuel, which duties and taxes are not paid,” he said.
Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) Director Beverly Milo said the deadline will immediately be followed by their intensified enforcement activities.
“BIR will be handling all the gasoline stations within the country, nationwide po ’yan. And as already stated, we will be doing it in collaboration with the service provider,” Milo said.
Sanctions
She said the testing will be done through a mobile unit laboratory, which will be equipped with a CCTV camera “to make the testing as transparent as possible.”
Milo said tested fuel, which will be found to be unmarked, diluted or adulterated (containing below the 95 percent expected marking chemical), would be considered to have failed the testing procedure.
She said they will order the closure of the facility with the unmarked fuel and they will be imposing the following fines to its operator: P2.5 million for the first offense; P5 million for the second offense; P10 million for the third offense.
“We will also confiscate their [unmarked fuel] product,” Milo said.
Revenue impact
The implementation of the new fuel anti-smuggling measure was deferred to August last year due to “security and safety issues.”
As of January 29, 2020, Maronilla said BOC and the BIR have already “marked” 2.5 billion liters of fuels from abroad with the specific chemical to show its importers have already paid the necessary excise taxes and import duties.
Maronilla said they already conducted the process of fuel marking at the Batangas oil terminal, oil refineries in Subic, Bataan, Cebu, Leyte, Davao and Cagayan de Oro.
He added that the delay in the implementation of the fuel-marking program contributed to their shortfall in collected revenue in 2019.
Last year, Maronilla said, they were only able to collect P630.34 billion worth of revenue, which was lower than their P661 billion target.
He said they expect to collect at least P10 billion worth of revenue with the full implementation of the fuel-marking scheme this year.