MANILA: The Senate and the House of Representatives will begin their bicameral conference committee meeting on the sin tax reform bill next week, Senator Franklin Drilon said yesterday.
“We’ll start the bicam at the end of the month because I expect to finish the budget under our schedule by November 28,” Drilon, Senate finance committee chairman, said at the weekly Kapihan sa Senado yesterday.
He said the bicameral conference meeting on the sin tax would coincide with the one for the 2013 national budget.
“Anyway, the bicam on the sin tax will be both easy. Well, I don’t say easy but I foresee a substantial agreement and I underscore substantial on the cigarette tax because the cigarette tax, we have projected it at about P23.5bn ($522m) as against the House version of P26bn ($578m),” Drilon said.
Drilon said he is confident the bicameral conference meeting on sin tax will proceed smoothly, citing the House leaders’ declaration that they are amenable to following the Senate version, at least with regard to cigarette tax rates.
“It is on the alcohol side which I expect some difficulty because we have assigned about P16bn ($355m) for the alcohol excise tax to achieve the 60-40 ratio,” he said. The House version projects P5bn ($110m) additional revenues from alcohol.
For a sin tax reform advocacy group, the bicameral conference committee is a battleground “shrouded in mystery” where surprise amendments can emerge.
“We are fighting three wars. We won in the Lower House and Senate and we have to win in the bicameral conference committee,” Action for Economic Reforms (AER) coordinator Filomeno Sta Ana III said.
“Any change in the consolidated bill should not deviate from what was already approved and instead, should incorporate the best features in both bills,” he said.
Jo-Ann Latuja, AER senior economist, lauded Drilon for pushing for provisions like the removal of the price classification freeze, imposition of a unitary tax rate for cigarettes of P26 ($.57) by 2017, annual tax increases of no less than four percent, imposition of higher tax rates for alcohol and earmarking of funds for universal health care, particularly for tobacco farmers and workers.
“Despite the attempts to water down the bill, we are very grateful for Sen Drilon’s success and being able to pull the tax rates up. Instead of P22 (per pack at a unitary rate), it became P26 ($.57),” Latuja said.
Sta Ana said legislators who sided with the tobacco industry should be excluded from the bicameral meeting.
He said Sen Ralph Recto even copied the Philip Morris proposal for his committee report.
Dr Antonio Dans of the UP College of Medicine, for his part, said the passage of the sin tax measure is a “major health victory from any point of view.”
“This is not our first sin tax bill, but it is our first substantial sin tax bill,” Dans said.
The Philippine Star
