BIR officials lament difficulty to tax motel owners

Asst. Revenue District -6 chief Badeth Mangaoang

By Mortz C. Ortigoza

URDANETA CITY – Two top tax honchos of the Bureau of Internal Revenue shared the view of Atty. Beverly Milo of the difficulty in imposing taxes to owners of motels in Pangasinan.

Assistant Revenue District Officers (ARDO) Ma. Bernadette Mangaoang and Charmaine C. dela Torres said that a lot of measures have been implemented already to evaluate how much revenue the BIR can collect to these perennial and nagging problems the motel businesses poised to them.

Dela Torre said that the problem that beset the BIR vis-à-vis the motel is lack of manpower to man a regular surveillance how much a certain motel owner exacts from customers that patronize it.

Atty Milo, who heads the BIR office here that supervised Eastern Pangasinan, recently distinguished hotel and motel in terms of tax compliance with the BIR.

“Ang hotel regulated because of the O.R (Official Receipt). Sa motel exclusive ang pumupunta doon. Ayaw mag request ng O.R (the customers because) identify ka. Kung baga iyong situation is more on not requesting an O.R . So nobody requesting an O.R,” Atty. Milo said with a chuckle.

One of the formulas Mangaoang said before to assess the number of couples who patronized these lucrative tryst businesses was the national tax office’s strategy where a BIR personnel lists how many cars entered the motel everyday.

She said usually the lists are recorded on the logbook of the motel security personnel who man its gate.

“Hindi naman everyday may BIR. Kaya nga e kukunin na lang nila iyong average,” she stressed.

In an earlier interview with this paper, Mr. Fred Quinto, the president of Hotel and Motel Associations in Pangasinan said that the BIR could use as basis the number of bed sheets and towels used by love birds. He said that the tax man could ask the laundry shops how many bed sheets and towels are consumed by this tryst hide-away business everyday.

But some tax observers who asked anonymity doubts the reliability of this measure as owners of laundry shops and motels could collude with each other by declaring a lower number of dirty, wet, and crumpled bed clothes and towels for the BIR to assess how much income tax to bill.

Mangaoang said that her office could count on the soap consumed by the customer in a particular period.

She argued that this can be checked by the government issued official receipts (O.R) used by the suppliers of soap to the motel owners