The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) is relaxing its invoicing requirements on market vendors and other operators of small business enterprises due to limited manpower and resources.

But revenue officials said Wednesday the invoicing requirement is still part of its agenda as they will concentrate in the collection of taxes from big-ticket items.

They admitted that it is not wise and realistic to deploy its limited manpower and resources on lowly traders who are not even required to pay income and business taxes if their yearly gross earnings do not exceed P100,000.

Record showed that the BIR has only 11,000 personnel, 3,000 of whom are tax examiners.

They said the number is inadequate to handle the examinations of the books of accounts of millions of individual and corporate taxpayers.

In comparison, Vietnam has more than 35,000 tax examiners and collectors to look into the financial statements of businesses which are mostly government-owned, the officials said.

Instead of throwing limited resources on small taxpayers, they said the BIR decided to intensify its run-after-tax-evaders (RATE) program as ordered by President Aquino to improve voluntary compliance and raise more funds to support his government’s pro-poor programs including education and universal health care.

The RATE program has become more urgent with the disclosure of Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima that the government is losing P250 billion annually through various tax cheating rackets.

BIR Commissioner Kim S. Jacinto-Henares said tax losses could be more, considering that 40 percent of business deals belong to the underground economy.