The Pasay City government has strongly denied any irregularity in the alleged missing P47-million real estate taxes on eight Real Property Units during a financial audit conducted by the Commission on Audit in 2008.

City Assessor’s Office officer-in-charge Fernando Fandiño said there was “no irregularity on the audited books and there were no missing P47-million in real estate taxes.”

He said it was a case of miscommunication with the CoA auditor who based its report using the “straight computation scheme” while the city government used the “stripping method.”

“Using the straight computation scheme is much easier to do just like what the CoA audit report showed, but we could not implement it to the other real estate taxpayers as it would be unfair for them since the location of the lots they occupy has their own categorical bracket of computations,” Fandiño said.

Fandiño furnished the Manila Bulletin documents showing that the difference in assessed value between the computations of CoA and the city government reached P1.76 billion multiplied by three percent tax rate totaling to P52.81 million, from which a ten percent discount was deducted to arrive at a tax due difference of P47.53 million.

“It’s only the method of computations on the unit value per square meter that matters most, thus making a difference of more than P47-million from our records compared to the report of the CoA,” Fandiño said.

In the same report, CoA also recommended to the city government the enhancement of the Real Property Tax Assessment System by coordinating with the city’s Management Information Technology Systes office to eliminate manual encoding of data to ensure reliability of outputs for an accurate computation and collection of taxes.

Based on the recommendation, Fandiño said City Mayor Wenceslao “Peewee” Trinidad ordered for the upgrading of the RPAS.

With Fandiño's clear explanation, Trinidad said every single cent remained intact on the city's coffers and vowed to collect more taxes for the city's progress.