TWENTY-one incumbent and former officers and employees of the One-Stop Shop Interagency Tax Credit and Duty Drawback Center (OSS-Center), an agency under the Department of Finance, have asked the Supreme Court to issue a writ for certiorari and writ of prohibition against 11 batches of notices of disallowances issued by the Commission on Audit in 2018 against eight firms involving P2.216 billion.
In their 168-page petition filed recently before the High Court, the OSS-Center officers and staff, speaking through their lawyer Marlon Mercado, said they were prompted to file the petition after the COA answered only two of the 11 petitions for review they filed with the agency.
They claimed the two answers were insufficient to answer the points they had raised in their petitions.
The petitioners sought a writ of certiorari to set aside 578 NDs and a separate writ of prohibition for COA to set aside the special audit report which was the basis for the issuance of the NDs.
A notice of disallowance contains audit decisions on an expenditure or refund, leading to a stop or suspension of the expenditure or refund, or return of the involved state money.
The petition stemmed from the COA’s special audit report where the agency ruled that 3,250 tax credit certificates issued between 2008 to 2014 to 33 Board of Investments-registered textile and garment firms involving P11.19 billion were all declared to have been issued without any legal or factual basis. Since the 2018 release of the special audit report, at least 578 NDs were issued in nine batches to eight of the 33 firms.
