Press Release
November 10, 2010

ANGARA CITES WAYS TO INCREASE GOV'T REVENUE

Senator Edgardo J. Angara outlined a basic plan to gradually increase the government's income during yesterday's Senate Committee hearing to discuss the 2011 budget of the Department of Finance (DOF).

"We must target key strategic solutions aimed towards increasing the government's revenue. Instead of spreading our resources into several different projects at the same time, we should just focus our efforts into fewer and more achievable goals, which would be more manageable," he explained.

He recommended two major categories for the DOF to concentrate on in the coming year:

"Aside from flagging all the loopholes in our tax system such as tax leaks and wastage, another area of interest should be the optimization of the returns on all of our government's assets," he said.

Angara, Vice-Chair of the Finance Committee, said that the committee had discovered this problem early on in the series of budget hearings being conducted at the Senate.

"Upon the review of our Committee, we found out that we have huge amounts of money in the form of pension funds and time deposits, which are bringing in ridiculously low returns."

According to Angara, this low yield is a result of the government's mismanagement of the said idle funds.

"Bottom line: the Philippine government is simply not earning enough from its investments. Therefore, we now see a need for a common investment criteria so that all this money would be put to good use," he emphasized.

News Latest News Feed