The Marcos administration will focus on the digitalization of some government services and the possible privatization of “many” state assets to help improve the government’s fiscal space.
Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno said during the Philippine Economic Briefing held in Singapore yesterday the government can do a lot to gain more fiscal space, as it aims to bring down the deficit-to-gross domestic product ratio to 3 percent.
“The major change that we’ll be getting benefit (from) is digitalization. We are going to computerize both the Bureau of Internal Revenue, although they have already made some progress, and the Bureau of Customs,” Diokno said.
The government will focus first on improving tax administration, he added.
“With economic growth, we will get more revenues because the tax system is very elastic, plus with improved tax administration, we are bound to collect a lot of revenues,” the finance chief said.
Meanwhile, Diokno said the government “will go in very strong” on privatization.
“Thee are many government assets that we can privatize, we will be very strong on that,” he said.
Diokno added as a lot of airports were constructed during the past administration, the government is going to privatize the management of the airports.
He also mentioned the rightsizing plan of the administration.
“I think things have actually changed, say from 20 years ago, maybe there’s some jobs that you don’t need now because you can computerize government operations. For example, you don’t see long lines now during the tax payment period, 95 percent of all taxes now are paid digitally. So there are lots of things that have changed,” Diokno said.
The finance chief also highlighted the “big elephant in the room” which is the planned reform of the military pension system.
“We’re going to fix that also. That is about P120 billion yearly. What kind of pension system is that, where it is indexed to the salary of the current armed personnel, and they don’t pay any premium, what kind of pension system is that? So we are going to revamp that. So easily we can gain some more fiscal space if we fix that problem,” Diokno said.
“There are lots of things we can do to reduce spending and enlarge the fiscal space, then we can concentrate on really, more important things,” he added.
