CABARROGUIS, Quirino, Feb. 27 (PIA) — Officials and employees of the Bureau of Internal Revenue-District 16 headed by Revenue District Officer Ignacio I. Camba Jr., got thumbs up from Regional Director Marina de Guzman of BIR Region 3 for exceeding their January 2012 collections by 25.55 percent.

De Guzman who graced the Tax Campaign Kick-off here last week, thanked the RDO 16 personnel for their continuous efforts in improving the tax collections of the province.

In January 2012, BIR-RDO 16 only collected P17,176,251.30 and for this year, it has collected P21,565,410.37 or an increase of P4,389,159.07.

The improved collection from income tax was attributed to the increase of remittances of expanded withholding tax and Value Added Taxes from the provincial government, Department of Public Works and Highways, Department of Education and local government unit of Nagtipunan.

There was also an increase of the percentage tax collections because of the enormous payments of open cases of stop/nonfilers generated from the Case Monitoring System.

De Guzman thanked the taxpayers for religiously paying their taxes which contributed to the good collection performance of the district as she urged those stop or non or stop filers who haven’t paid their taxes to visit the BIR.

“From January to April 15, we will be using the carrot or the soft approach in dealing with non or stop filers so they still have much time to settle their tax payments before we will employ the stick or hard approach,” de Guzman warned.

Based on the report of BIR-RDO 16, there are 2,487 registered taxpayers but only 1,106 of them are filers and 45 of them did not pay any amount to the BIR.

De Guzman said taxes paid to government will go back to the communities in the form of programs and projects for the improvement of the living condition of the people.