City treasurer: To tax or not to tax allowances

The Mandaue City Treasurer’s Office will study if it can tax Mandaue court employees allowances.

City Treasurer Regal Oliva said that the office received a memorandum from the Commission on Audit (COA) to tax the court employees allowances.

“We could always check it because the question is not the release of the allowance. What is being asked is if the allowances are taxable or not,” Oliva said.

“Because if it is taxable it is the duty of the city government to withhold the tax. If it is not taxable then we have to release the whole amount,” he said.

And it would already be the duty of the person given the allowances to declare it to the BIR.

“If it is not taxable, we will justify it to COA,” Oliva said.

For the past years, Oliva said the city government had been allocating P6.4 million from their annual budget for the allowances of the more or less 50 court employees.

Judges in Mandaue City are receiving P15,000 monthly allowance, P10,000 for the prosecutors and P5,000 for the clerk of court./Correspondent Fe Marie D. Dumaboc