5 March 2020
We, the undersigned business and professional organizations, jointly express our support for Senate Bill (SB) No. 1357, the Senate version of the Corporate Income Tax and Incentives Reform Act (CITIRA) which is a core component of the Duterte administration’s Comprehensive Tax Reform Program that seeks to make the corporate tax system simpler, fairer, equitable, regionally competitive and more efficient.
We support CITIRA as it seeks to reduce the corporate income tax (CIT) rate from 30% to 20%, a rate that will eventually put us within the ASEAN range, and at par with our closest regional counterparts Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia. This move will not only make us more competitive in attracting foreign investments, but it will also make our domestic corporates more competitive as they expand their operations or bring their goods in the international market.
We support the CITIRA as it will modernize the fiscal incentives system. We believe in the underlying principles of having a tax incentives system that is transparent, performance-based, targeted and time-bound. We believe in the equitable sharing of the tax burden, as we believe in the equitable enjoyment of living in an orderly, healthy and prosperous society.
We support SB 1357 as it addresses refinements that we have previously proposed: