Taxes for the digital economy
Both representatives from Congress and the Senate wants taxes levied on digital services to help the gov’t shore up its revenue to help fight COVID-19.
House ways and means committee chair and Albay Rep. Joey Salceda want video and music streaming apps, as well as ads on social media as well as online sales platforms, pay withholding tax, which he plans to call the Netflix tax, Facebook ads tax, and Lazada tax.
As far as the percentage of the Taxes that Salceda wants to impose on Netflix, he said that the Philippines might as well impose a 12% tax on video and music subscriptions, despite the standard for the rest of the world being pegged at 5%.
For Lazada and other online platforms, he proposes that they become withholding tax agents of their suppliers since some stores in the platform already pay the correct taxes.
Similarly, Sen. Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. has also filed a resolution asking the Senate to conduct an inquiry into the possibility of collecting taxes from multi-national streaming services as well as the digital economy, in general.
If a law on taxing digital services is approved, the government can block online or digital platforms that neither pay the right taxes nor comply with tax laws.
