Saturday, February 23, 2008 Mayor seeks review of Koronadal revenue code By Allen V. Estabillo
KORONADAL CITY -- The City Government is pushing for the revision of the city's revenue code this year in a bid to increase the local government's revenues.
Mayor Fernando Miguel said he has commissioned a review of the local revenue code "to make it more responsive to the development thrusts" of the City Government.
He said the initial proposed amendments would cover the provisions on the appraisal and assessment of real property taxes, special levies, and other regular taxes.
To complement the proposed amendments, the mayor said the City Government would plan new strategies to help increase the city's revenue collections, double their tax collection efforts, and improve its tax collection systems.
"Right now, the City Government still relies much on the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA) and we would like to reverse that. We will try to increase our revenues so we will become less dependent from our IRA," the mayor said.
The IRA refers to the National Government-imposed taxes collected by local government units (LGUs).
Under the Local Government Code of 1991, the LGUs will get 40 percent of the national internal revenue taxes, while the National Government will retain 60 percent. In the case of the cities, they receive an allotment of 23 percent from the total share of the LGUs.
In 2007, Miguel said the City Government received an IRA share of P286.9 million, which reportedly increased by 13.4 percent since 2005.
Out of the said fund, he said the local government allotted P145.3 million for various development initiatives that covered social development, economic development, infrastructure, development, administration, and environment.
Aside from the revision of the revenue code, the mayor said the local government would push for the institutionalization of the city's computerized treasury operations and strengthen its efforts to improve economic enterprise operations in the area.
They will also launch this year the city's geographical information system or GIS mapping.
GIS mapping was earlier offered to LGUs by the National Government to help map out the location and distribution of registered business for tax mapping and produce thematic maps that indicate different assessment or market values for land parcels.
"With all these in place, I think we will be able to stabilize our finance operations later on and we will be able to finance and sustain our development endeavors," Miguel added. (AVE)
