No probation, only jail, for tax evader

The Court of Tax Appeals (CTA) stood by its decision to jail convicted tax evader Benjamin G. Kintanar, saying he was not qualified for probation.

The tax court, in an en banc resolution promulgated last Nov. 21, denied for lack of merit Kintanar’s motion for the court to reconsider its earlier denial of his request for probation.

The Bureau of Internal Revenue, which received a copy of the 10-page resolution last Dec. 3, noted that the tax court stressed that  probation is a privilege granted to “pertinent qualified offender.”

The CTA in September 2010 found Kintanar guilty of not filing income tax returns in 2000 and 2001, depriving the government revenues of totaling P8.65 million, excluding penalties and surcharges.

Kintanar is the husband of multilevel marketer Gloria Kintanar, who has also been convicted for not paying P15 million in taxes on her income as a distributor of Forever Living products.

Kintanar faces imprisonment for at least a year and 10 years at most.

Kintanar had appealed the conviction and raised the issue to the CTA en banc in April 2011 but it was dismissed for lack of merit.

Kintanar again filed a motion for reconsideration last June and applied for probation. He pleaded for the court to modify the sentence, remove the jail term, so that he could work outside of prison and earn money to pay for his tax liabilities.

Kintanar also said that by putting him under probation, he could be considered as a “trimedia example of the government in convincing the general public that it is best to pay taxes.”

But in the November ruling, the CTA said Kintanar “is no longer qualified to apply for nor allowed to avail of the benefits of probation… since his intention to apply was only expressed not only after he had perfected his appeal from the judgment of conviction.”