The Pasay City government has lost over P500 million due to unauthorized condonation of tax arrears and irregularities in the collection of real estate taxes from both government and private property owners, the Commission on Audit has disclosed.
In its 2015 annual audit report for the Pasay city government, CoA chided local officials for writing off arrears in real estate taxes of “various individual taxpayers and government-owned or – controlled corporations that resulted in the understatement of the account to some P868.303 million.”
“Payments of other taxpayers were fraudulently recorded as payments of delinquent taxpayers,” CoA also noted as it examined randomly selected five samples of real estate payments.
For the five transactions alone, the city government already lost P328,087.01 “in terms of foregone collections.”
“This amount could have been used by the city in the delivery of basic services to its constituents,” State auditors said. (Ben R. Rosario)