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Drilon: Make public suppliers’ ITRs: Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon, during Thursday’s virtual hearing of the Blue Ribbon Committee, October 28, 2021 on the budget utilization of the Department of Health (DOH) on COVID-19-related programs, moves to make public the income tax returns (ITRs) of the suppliers of medical supplies to the DOH, which were provided by the Bureau of Internal Revenue to the committee in an executive session. Drilon made the motion as he observed that Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. claimed a tax credit of P96 million and did not pay tax; most of the ITRs of the suppliers “were either not filed, unreadable and/or incomplete”; Pharmally supplier TigerPhil Marketing Corporation’s taxable income from 2017 to 2019 may be underdeclared considering the big jump of taxable income for 2020, which they amended after the revelations in the committee; and that Xuzhou Construction Machinery Group has no ITRs from 2017 to 2021. Drilon further stressed that Xuzhou during the previous hearing admitted that they did not pay taxes. The minority leader said that based on his computation, out of the P42 billion in supply contract awarded by the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management (PS-DBM), the suppliers were supposed to have paid P7.5 billion in income taxes. (Screen grab/Senate PRIB)