- Details
- Category: Economy
- Published on Monday, 20 May 2013 20:13
- Written by InterAksyon.com
The biggest umbrella organization of real-estate developers in the country said the Department of Finance’s (DOF) bid to remove mass housing from the sectors enjoying tax perks under the annual investment blueprint runs counter to government programs aimed at making housing affordable.
“The tax perks and incentives provided by the IPP [Investment Priorities Plan] allow developers to keep the prices of our mass-housing projects within the reach of the average Filipino. If mass housing is removed from the 2013 IPP, that would be the nightmare. This is a threat to national growth and development and it will deny millions of Filipinos of their dreams of owning a home,” Chamber of Real Estate and Builders Association Inc. (Creba) President Charlie A. V. Gorayeb said in a statement.
Removing mass housing from this year’s IPP “will also have a negative effect on the 75 or so peripheral industries involved in the mass housing industry, like steel and cement manufacturers and other local suppliers,” Gorayeb said.
The DOF has proposed removing mass housing, as well as iron and steel, motor vehicle manufacturing, and shipbuilding from the business activities eligible for incentives under the 2013 IPP amid government moves to limit the grant of tax perks.
The DOF proposal has pushed back President Aquino’s approval of the 2013 IPP, as the Board of Investments (BOI), which shepherds the drafting of the annual IPP, wants to address the issues the department raised.
“We are calling on the DOF to reconsider its position of having mass housing removed from the list of investment priorities as this goes against the provisions of the Omnibus Investments Code of 1987 and the national housing program,” Gorayeb said, noting that mass housing has been on the IPP for more than a decade.
“If the DOF intends to generate more tax revenues, it should propose measures to run after big-time smuggling syndicates where billions in government revenues are lost instead of removing tax incentives given to the mass-housing sector,” he said.
Gorayeb said a Creba position paper submitted to the BOI last month noted that “mass-housing projects also generate thousands of jobs which contribute to the local economies and reduce the problem of unemployment.”
Under the proposed guidelines of the 2013 IPP, new mass-housing projects outside the National Capital Region (NCR) and Metro Cebu will be entitled to a three-year income-tax holiday (ITH), while new and expansion projects within NCR and Metro Cebu will have a two-year ITH—shorter than the usual four- to eight-year ITH given to other projects qualified under the IPP.
The proposed 2013 IPP—mostly a carryover of the 2012 version—includes 13 investment areas in the preferred activities list, namely, agriculture/agribusiness and fishery; creative industries/knowledge-based services; shipbuilding; mass housing; iron and steel; energy; infrastructure and public-private partnership (PPP) projects; research and development; green projects; manufacture of motor vehicles; strategic projects; hospital/medical services; and disaster prevention, mitigation and recovery projects.
The mandatory list, as provided for by various laws, covers the following industries: industrial tree plantation; exploration, mining, quarrying and processing of minerals; publication or printing of books/textbooks; refining, storage, marketing and distribution of petroleum products; ecological solid waste management; clean water projects; rehabilitation, self-development and self-reliance of persons with disability; renewable energy; and tourism. InterAksyon.com
The annual IPP also provides incentives to export activities, as well as growth sectors in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
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