TABUK CITY, Kalinga – Cooperatives in the city and this province await with bated breath the response of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR)-Cordillera to their applications for the renewal of their Tax Exemption Certificates (TEC) after the Revenue District Office (RDO) here agreed to indorse the applications.
This developed after member cooperatives of the City Cooperative Development Council (CCDC) trooped to the RDO on Monday to plead that the BIR renew their TECs while they produce the tax identification numbers (TINs) of all their members.
Cooperatives specially the large ones are balking at the TIN requirement of the BIR because of the difficulty of having all their members obtain the number.
In the course of the meeting with OIC-Assistant Revenue District Officer Dominga Bangao, the cooperative representatives produced a copy of Revenue Memorandum Circular 102-2016 issued on October 24 which among others provides that cooperatives be issued TECs pending their compliance with the TIN requirement within six months.
The memorandum further said that failure to produce the TINs within six months would result in the revocation of the TEC.
The memorandum circular also relaxed the requirement for the presentation of National Statistics Office-issued birth certificates for securing TINs stating that any government-issued identification card and even residence certificate will do.
The cooperative officers were saying that the NSO-issued birth certificate is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to their compliance with the TIN requirement because it entails expense and time to secure one.
CCDC Chairman Dulnuan said during the meeting that the BIR should not shift the responsibility of seeing to it that residents have TINs because the agency is already very old and has not yet made all qualified Filipinos obtain TINs.
The cooperatives were forced to appeal to the BIR after they received letters dated October 18 telling them that with their TECs already expired, they should pay their taxes.
With most of them having their applications for TEC renewal returned in some cases more than once due to the TIN and some other requirements, the local cooperatives are still anxious about how the BIR regional office will act on their applications this time.
Dulnuan could not understand how come the implementing rules and regulations of RA 9520 now appear to prevail over the law itself explaining that the law exempts cooperatives from taxes and it was only in the IRR formulated by the BIR that it says that cooperatives which transact with non-members will be taxed in as far as the sales with outsiders is concerned.
Dulnuan estimates that TAFAMULCO would pay as much as P1M a year if its TEC is not renewed.
He said that just like all the other cooperatives in the province save one, their application for renewal was returned due to non-fulfillment of the TIN requirement. He said he did not feel the need because under Form 1945, the TIN requirement is under applications for new TEC and not for renewal.
He said that there is difficulty in producing the TINs because of the presence of inactive members and likewise those members who live out of the way.
Dulnuan could not understand that in Region 2, even before RMC 102-2016, cooperatives were issued renewals without submitting their TINs but that in fairness, other regions face the same
problem as that of Kalinga.**By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
