Philippines' tax cheats reported through facebook

Updated July 16, 2010 11:24:31

The Philippines government has joined the growing list of international institutions using online communities and social networking platforms to gather information.
President Benigno Aquino has turned to Facebook and Twitter in his campaign to track down tax cheats and boost government revenue.

Presenter: Claudette Werden
Speakers: Kim Henares, Philippines Internal Revenue Commissioner; Jonathan Ravelas, Market Strategist, Banco de Oro; Ping Lo, Social Media Co-ordinator, Australian Broadcasting Corporation

WERDEN: The Philippines has nearly 15 million Facebook users, making it the eighth largest market for the site, according to the Checkfacebook.com website, which tracks data on Facebook advertising. The country's newly appointed Internal Revenue Commissioner, Kim Henares, says the idea of using social media began when people started posting complaints about tax cheats on her Facebook page.

HENARES: Actually it came naturally I think to people. I did not even ask them to do it, they just did it which surprised me. They were very specific, including the company name, the name of the tax payer, even the name of our officers. And then after that what I did was I announced that maybe they should post it in my email, rather than in my Facebook because, otherwise it becomes a public information right? That's why in a sense until we make sense about how we go about the Facebook, I stopped accepting friends, otherwise everyone will know about it.

WERDEN: Her investigators are now looking into more than 100 allegations of tax evasion. Her aim is to boost tax revenue to 15 per cent of GDP within a year, after it fell to 12.8 per cent last year from a record 17 per cent in 2007.

Jonathan Ravelas, market strategist with the country's largest bank, Banco de Oro Unibank, believes restructuring the tax system could be a better way of dealing with tax avoidance, but he admits the online strategy will have a deterrent effect and possibly stave off the need to impose newer or higher taxes.

RAVELAS: For the government it is I think one way of trying to be accessible to the people. At the same time for government to start verifying all of these posts either on Facebook or Twitter, it will take time. But of course the nice thing about it is that they're trying to exhaust all means to probably to enhance collection efficiency will probably help boost and probably not resort to raising new set of taxes.

WERDEN: The Philippines government is not the only exploiter of social networking, increasingly financial institutions are using sites such as Facebook to check credit risks and loan defaulters.

Police forces, including the Mumbai Anti terror squad, Victoria Police in Australia and Interpol have all been aided by social media in their investigations. The international police organization recently launched a public appeal on social networking websites for help in the search for 26 people convicted or suspected of serious crimes around the world . Since the call on the the 5th of July, seven people have been arrested or located.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's social media co-ordinator, Ping Lo, says the whistleblower helpline is nothing new and modern technology is just speeding up the process.

LO: And the other thing about it is, it's recording it for prosperity. So it's becoming increasingly easy to share and to share with vastly more people than you would normally share with. So not only are you replacing word of mouth with text but you're replacing a one-on-one conversation with one-to-many or many-to-many, so I think it's a double issue of the fact that you're sharing to a much broader audience but also those words can come back to haunt you, when you think they've long since passed.