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Thursday, August 18, 2005
34 doctors may go to prison: lawyer
By Raquel C. Bagnol
DAVAO CITY -- Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) District 113 Officer Evelyn Sardido recently asked the Office of the Ombudsman to dismiss the charges filed against her by 34 Davao-based physicians for lack of merit.
Sardido's legal counsel said the 34 doctors ran the risk of being prosecuted for tax fraud and facing jail time if convicted.
The tax officer filed a 23-page motion to dismiss dated August 11, with the assistance of counsel Ramon Edison Batacan of the Batacan, Montejo, and Vicencio Law Firm.
Batacan said the filing of the case against Sardido by the doctors was ill-advised.
"The complaint is not only baseless but was designed to harass the BIR from pursuing its tax drive against erring medical practitioners," he said.
Batacan added that Sardido could not have committed acts of oppression against these doctors since her sending out notices of tax deficiency to them was pursuant to the exercise of her official functions under the law.
"The claim of these doctors that Sardido did not have the requisite letter of authority from the BIR commissioner is specious, since it is only necessary when a taxpayer is requested to open his book of accounts for examination," Batacan said.
He clarified that there was no examination conducted on the books of these doctors in as much as information on their income was sourced from official documents submitted by third parties to the BIR, like hospitals.
"These documents cross-matched with their Income Tax Returns (ITR) and business tax returns and showed that there was under-declaration of income by as much as
9,000 percent," Batacan said, adding that this does not include other sources of income and those derived from Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) remitted
to other BIR district offices outside Davao City.
The 34 medical practitioners filed a complaint before the Ombudsman charging Sardido for oppression, inefficiency, incompetence, and for other violations after Sardido sent them notifications of their tax deficiencies in their 2003 tax returns.
Sardido said she sent letter notices to the doctors attaching computations of undeclared revenues and deficiency taxes based on their 2003 ITRs with the
approval of BIR Director Linda Omila-Yap.
In addition, Sardido said dialogs were conducted to enlighten the medical practitioners on how the unreported income was discovered. She said she conferred with Yap and BIR Commissioner Guillermo Parayno Jr. about the matter.
Sardido added that of the 256 medical practitioners in Davao City, 173 amended their tax returns and paid the corresponding taxes which totaled to P20,573,985.93.
She maintains that there is no oppression because she simply sent out notices of tax deficiencies.
Oppression, as defined by law, is an act of cruelty, severity and unlawful execution, or excessive use of authority. She said she gave the medical practitioners the chance to correct their ITRs to avoid "legal inconvenience" but they chose not to do so.
On the charges of inefficiency, Sardido said she had always surpassed the annual target collections since 2003 to the present and has gained several awards as Top Collection Performer of Revenue Region 19, therefore the charges are baseless and unfounded.
Sardido also said that she did not divulge the names of the doctors to the media to protect their identities and reputation. (Sun.Star Davao/Sunnex)
(August 18, 2005 issue)
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