TKO

My first thought was: Has the government gone suicidal?

That was after I saw Manny Pacquiao complaining to the press a day after his bout with Brandon Rios about the shoddy treatment he got from the Bureau of Internal Revenue. The BIR, he said, had just frozen his bank deposits along with his properties. Consequently he had nothing to give to the survivors of “Yolanda,” to whom he had promised his personal help and to whom he had dedicated his fight. But not to worry, he told the Taclobanons, he had borrowed P1 million from friends to be able to come to their aid.

He protested the freeze order as unjustified, saying he had already paid his taxes in the United States, a practice recognized in this country. The BIR just refused to recognize it. “I am not a criminal or a thief, I am not hiding anything. The money that was garnished by the BIR is not stolen. It came from all of the punches, beatings, blood and sweat that I endured in the ring.” Why is it, he asked, that crooks in this country are treated better than honest and hardworking people?

BIR chief Kim Henares dismisses Pacquiao’s complaint. It’s all his fault, she says. The BIR has given him all these years to comply with its requests to submit the necessary documents. He hasn’t. All he has submitted is a letter from US promoter Top Rank saying he has paid his taxes in the United States. “This is a mere scrap of paper; anyone can write that.” Request has turned to demand, and the BIR has enforced it. It just so happened the ruling of the tax appeals court’s First Division to freeze his deposits came out the day after he won the fight. The court made the ruling two weeks ago.

In any case, Henares says, the court has frozen only two of Pacquiao’s bank deposits amounting to P1.1 million. “Don’t tell me he only has P1.1 million. Where is the rest of [his] money? I have no idea. It has not been garnished (seized).” She says she can’t understand why Pacquiao is making a big deal out of his tax case at this point. “Maybe he should hire better lawyers and accountants.”

Well, the caustic tone isn’t going to help. The public is going to read arrogance in it, and it wouldn’t be entirely wrong. At the very least, questions remain. How much of Pacquiao’s money has really been frozen? It strains credulity to see how Pacquiao, who may or may not be scrupulous about his accounting, would complain about having been rendered penniless by the loss of P1.1 million. We should know soon enough if that’s true.

More to the point, Pacquiao may not have submitted the documents but has submitted a good argument, or one the public can buy. “If I have not paid the correct taxes in America, the US authorities would have come after me and I would not have been able to travel there.” You know what they say: The only two inevitable things in America are death and taxes. Both fall on, and fell, the good and the bad, the rich and the poor. Maybe Pacquiao already has good lawyers and accountants, nobody’s running after him in America. Only here.

But that is the least of the government’s worries.

Can there be a worse case of bad timing? You don’t know where to begin to talk about the tsunami the BIR has just sent in the government’s direction. You knew Pacquiao was going to make a comeback fight, you knew the country was prostrate from a killer typhoon, you knew the people needed a hero to give them the hope they could climb back from their pit of despair. And you couldn’t hold your tax case in abeyance? You couldn’t set aside your freeze order for a while? You had to stick it to the one person who had just given more relief to the survivors of Yolanda than the aid-givers? You had to bring down the one person the ravaged, the desperate, and the despairing identify with heart and soul?

That’s not just lacking a sense of the public pulse, that’s lacking a grasp of reality. When the BIR started going after Pacquiao a couple of years ago, P-Noy was at the height of his popularity. He is now at his lowest since he became president, widely pilloried if not for the fury of Yolanda at least for the fury of its effects. Imagine now Pacquiao landing in Tacloban to be swarmed upon by the survivors of Yolanda, the same people who gathered in the gymnasiums and found respite from their troubles in the way he pummeled Rios to submission, in the way he came back from his own crushing defeat last year, in the way they knew they would rise from their own abject state, and saying, “Sorry, I wanted to bring more, but waray na pera, na-checkpoint ni Kim.”

Much of that will be (melo)drama: Pacquiao knows his theater, he has been known to wring emotional situations for whatever they are worth, and he has his political ambitions, too. But it won’t just resonate with the Taclobanons, it will resonate with Filipinos nationwide and abroad.

In the end, what will the BIR accomplish by freezing Pacquiao’s deposits, whatever the amount? Will it succeed in showing it is resolute and will go after the high and mighty along with the poor and lowly, death and taxes being inevitable in this country, too? No. Pacquiao’s millions (of dollars) notwithstanding, the poor and lowly will continue to think of him as one of their own, who get by not by pork and perk, not by inheriting a family fortune or a family crime, but by toiling and scrapping and, yes, fighting. The poor and lowly will see only that, unlike Pacquiao, people like Lucio Tan will find only death inevitable, not taxes.

Will the BIR succeed in putting the fear of God, or Henares, in the ungodly or tax-evading, and make them pay their taxes? No, it will succeed only in lighting up defiance in their hearts, in solidarity with their unappreciated hero, in solidarity with their oppressed idol.

Guess who’ll get TKOed in this fight.