Good citizen loses sight of ‘daang matuwid’

Our cousin, now a Canadian citizen, entrusted to my older brother the administration of his property in Manila. It is a vacant lot. Because of the obscene increase in the amount of real estate taxes imposed by the stooges of Mayor Joseph Estrada, he now desperately has to have it leased to raise funds. Little did he realize, just recently, how arduous it would be to obtain permits from the government agencies concerned.

First, my brother was told to go to the barangay for clearance. (That would be easy enough but for the fact that it was absolutely unnecessary. The barangay just wants the money for issuing any certificate!) Next, he was told to register with the Department of Trade and Industry which has its checklist of documents. After that, he was told to line up at the City Hall of Manila for a mayor’s permit which has its own set of requirements to ram down the taxpayer’s throat! And finally, he was told to proceed to the Bureau of Internal Revenue to apply for authority to print official receipts, requiring the submission of all those things asked to be obtained before going there. Then, the real deal breaker: he was told to be prepared in case the BIR decided to check his taxpayer’s identification number and search for any problem in his tax history!

My brother merely wants to be legit with official receipts registered with the BIR to pay taxes on behalf of our cousin. Now, he may just go “underground”! No hassle. No taxes! That’s why 80 percent of lessors around the country don’t bother issuing official receipts. Just visit any house near schools and you will find lodgers and boarders paying rents to landlords who don’t bother with official receipts.

The BIR’s labyrinthine procedures are so “taxing” they make taxpayers dizzy: Does it really want all that paperwork or just the tax money? I cannot, for the life of me, understand why the BIR would want to first ascertain a taxpayer’s status before it can authorize him to have BIR-sanctioned official receipts printed!

Who wants that aggravation?  Who wants to be “audited”? In this country, that is more often just a cover for “extortion”! And the BIR complains that so many businesses are not issuing such official receipts anymore? Come to think of it, has anyone ever noticed that in this bureaucracy of ours, the more one tries religiously to comply with government requirements, the more he feels harassed, instead of feeling pampered for being such a good citizen?  Saan ba talaga ang “daang matuwid”?

—GABRIELLE MICHELLE M. AGUILLERA,

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