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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Where have all our taxes gone?

Recently, I was invited to a focus group discussion initiated by the Asian Institute of Management (AIM). It was a forum that opened lids on issues of corruption.  Particularly on how businessmen manage to survive through their daily dealings that apparently impact their operations.

Those who know me knows that I'm not so much interested in talks about politics.  But I thought I'd share this.  I hope it could lead to something better.

The latest statistics on the cost of corruption according to AIM's research revealed an estimated 20% of the Philippine budget that is lost to corruption every year.

This translates to the Philippines a high probable loss PhP 308.2 billion for the entire year or PhP 843 million each day.  It's a lot of money and this is from a 2010 budget set at PhP 1.4 trillion this year.  You can imagine how much money was lost in the past years.

But what could this huge amount of cash tell us?

It could've sheltered 3.6B families at 40sqm per house. It could've hired 1.6M teachers to public schools. It could've built 598 classrooms, or 102km farm-to-market roads, or 266K barangay health centers.

Tell me what you think about this.

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