Whenever the Bureau of Customs (BOC) or the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) exceeds its revenue collection targets, it is always a cause for celebration.
This means the government has ramped up its available funds to fulfill the financial requirements of the national budget, and numerous pro-people projects will be funded.
“We collected P219.385 billion in total revenue – that’s a surplus of P8.489 billion from our target for that particular period. So, there’s a surplus of about… more than P8 billion by the Bureau of Customs for the first quarter of 2024,” Assistant Commissioner Vincent Philip Maronilla said.
Part of these numbers were voluntary payments by companies through our prior disclosure program amounting to about P1.88 billion – the highest in the history of the Bureau of Customs per quarter.
Also, the customs bureau confiscated P11.8 billion worth of smuggled goods from January to March this year, while the total for 2023 was P48 billion, making smuggling still a very lucrative but risky venture for some.
It is good that the digitization process in the bureau is 96.99 percent complete.
“For the first quarter of 2024, we’re at 96.99 percent digitalized. That means that 161 out of the 166 processes of the Bureau of Customs are now digitalized,” Maronilla said, adding that the digitization project was mainly created to minimize face-to-face transactions to eliminate corruption.
Such digitization will have a new game changer for the BOC. President Bongbong Marcos has approved a single invoicing system to expedite and improve the monitoring of all goods imported to the Philippines.
Marcos' Administrative Order 23 said: "A single electronic invoicing system controlled by the Philippine government is necessary to effectively monitor international trade transactions of all imported goods.
"The order is expected to speed up the inspection of all imported goods entering the country and further strengthen national security, safeguard consumers' rights, and protect the environment against sub-standard and dangerous imported goods.
Signed on May 13 by Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin, the AO creates the Committee for Pre-border Technical Verification and Cross-border Electronic Invoicing, to be chaired by the finance secretary. The members are the secretaries of agriculture, trade, energy, health, environment and natural resources and information communications technology, along with the heads of BOC and PDEA.
With this advanced technology, the government through the BOC will have more revenues to collect and less smuggled goods to contend with.
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