BIR’s wrong priorities

Much ruckus has been raised by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) ad which showed that public school teachers are paying more taxes than doctors do. The BIR, whose end-all and be-all and raison d’être is to deal with and process figures and numbers, failed to see the gross and monumental error that is displayed, for all the world to see, by the ad itself. The public school teacher is shown to have earned a salary of P852,169.48 for one academic year (10 months) of work. That comes to about P85,217 salary per month. Pray tell, what kind of “school teacher” makes that much money! Is she into selling hotdogs and burgers inside her classroom?

The computations written on the blackboard in the background are all wrong as well! 50 x 0.25 = 12.50 and not 350; 60 x 0.25 = 15 and not 2.4; 450 divided by 1,500 = 0.3 or 30 percent and not 0.03 or 3 percent. What are the implications? That public school teachers are teaching error in their classrooms? What it clearly shows to me is that the entire ad campaign is falsely fabricated, made-up and concocted! The BIR is talking about honesty, but its ad is completely dishonest for presenting figures that are incorrect, unreal and blatantly wrong!

The BIR should instead tell us how much tax Janet Lim Napoles paid in all the years she was amassing her fabulous wealth, with the help of some very “honorable” lawmakers. That is the kind of openness, transparency and honesty we the people need to be reminded of. Doctors at least render services that often determine whether sick patients live or die. The whole point of thievery, on the other hand, especially when it is done on a scale as massive as the pork barrel scam, is to have it at all, at all costs, and now!!! Thieves don’t care even if they kill you and you die. Khaled Hossein in his novel “The Kite Runner” wrote: “There is only one sin, and that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.” The question to answer is this: Is wholesale brigandage and plunder of the public coffers not taxable money-making schemes, considering that so many who did it have become filthy rich?

—ANTONIO CALIPJO GO,

academic supervisor,

Marian School of Quezon City,

199 Sauyo Road, Novaliches, QC [email protected]