BY EVANGELINE DE VERA
SEN. Mar Roxas yesterday asked the Supreme
Court to compel the Department of Finance and the Bureau of
Internal Revenue to implement on a full-year basis the tax
exemption for minimum wage earners.
In a 25-page petition, Roxas asked the high
court to nullify several provisions of the implementing
guidelines of R.A. 9504 which exempts minimum wage earners from
income taxation and increasing the personal and additional
exemptions of taxpayers.
Assailed in the petition was a BIR regulation
which limits the application of R.A. 9504 to a half-year basis,
specifically commencing July 6, 2008.
Roxas said the regulation is contrary to the
legislative intent of the law, which he said is to make it
applicable to compensation or income received beginning Jan. 1,
2008, or on a full-year basis, limits the definition of a
minimum wage earner, and imposes restrictions that were not in
the law.
"Thus, instead of helping our workers, the
BIR curtailed the supposed complete enjoyment of the benefits
the minimum wage earners are d rightfully entitled to," the
petition said.
Roxas said the definition of a minimum wage
earner in R.A. 9504 "gives no room for doubt that the law does
not give any qualification as to who are minimum wage earners,
regardless of the amount of benefits a worker receives."
Named respondents in the suit were Finance
Secretary Margarito Teves and BIR Commissioner Lilian Hefti.
Rep. Risa Hontiveros of the party-list group
Akbayan said Malacañang is resorting to an illegal "partial"
implementation of the wage law after watering down the original
proposal from the House.
"The original agreement at the committee level was to give
zero tax for minimum wage earners. Suddenly, the Department of
Finance intervened, claiming falsely that this would lead to
deficits. What came out was a watered down version that granted
absolute exemption only to families with four children and not
to individual minimum wage earners," she said.
