MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines will name a finance attaché to China to help resolve discrepancies in trade data between the two countries which resulted in billions of pesos in revenue losses.
“I will appoint a finance attaché to China to talk and go over the exporters there so we can solve this,” Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez told a budget hearing at the Senate yesterday.
“We would like our attaché in China to work very closely with our BOC (Bureau of Customs) here and the BOC in China,” he said.
According to Finance data, there exists an “alarming” discrepancy worth P1.8 trillion in trade data between the Philippines and its trading partners in 2014.
As a result, the government lost P231 billion in revenues that year, equivalent to two percent of gross domestic product.
Dominguez said around 30 percent of the P1.8 trillion came from China, which is the country’s fourth biggest export destination and top source of imports in July, latest figures showed.
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Specifically, China cornered 11.3 percent of exports and 11.2 percent of imports during the period.
“The differential is about 50 percent (from what is reported here and there) so with that, we hope the attaché can assist the BOC to correct them,” Dominguez said.
Appointing a finance attaché is consistent with Department of Finance Order 105-2015 issued during the previous administration that mandated a two-year stint for every person deployed overseas.
They are appointed by the President upon recommendation by the Finance Secretary. It was not clear if an attaché was deployed under the previous government, which recommended placing some in the US and Japan.
“The attaché in China will also have a job of starting up our membership in the AIIB. We are proposing to the Senate to ratify our membership with them,” Dominguez said.
He was pertaining to the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a multilateral institution tasked at lending to member-countries for infrastructure development.
National Treasurer Roberto Tan, who just came last week from an AIIB meeting, told the same hearing the agreement was already forwarded by the Office of the President to Senate for approval.
The Philippines has until the end of the year to ratify the agreement, of which only 10 of the 51 signatories have not done so.
“We believe we would be able to avail of financing here at almost concessional terms for our program that is heavily on infrastructure,” Dominguez said.
