A massive revamp of personnel will be effected at the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) at the end of the month that will involve officials holding positions from regional directors down to revenue district officers (RDO) and division chiefs.

A top revenue official who sought anonymity said the reshuffle was supposed to be carried out early this month but was delayed due to the difficulty in evaluating the performance of field officials based on prescribed guidelines dubbed as Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

KPI allots certain percentage points for every aspect of a taxman's daily job such as collection, number of business padlocked under the "Oplan Kandado" program and services rendered to taxpayers under the "Handang Maglingkod" scheme.

The revenue official said that unlike in previous revamp, BIR Commissioner Sixto Esquivias IV has directed the management to select the new heads of field offices based on the KPI grading system that ranks the officials from highest to the lowest. Traditionaly the revamp is carried out at the discretion of the commissioner and based upon reccommendations of his key advisers.

BIR Deputy Commissioner for Operations Nelson M. Aspe said that if he had his way, he would remove 20 percent of the bureau's directors and RDOs who are ranked low and replaced them by others who can do the job better.

"There will be no more palakasan in appointing officials to key and senstive posts as such appointment will henceforth be based purely on performance," Esquivias said.

The BIR faces the almost unsurmountable task of meeting its P798-billion collection goal this year.

Latest statistics showed the bureau collected only P500 billion during the first nine months of the year, although insiders attributed the shortfall to laws reducing tax rate for both individual and corporate taxpayers and the worldwide economic slowdown.

Last month, BIR regional offices sustained collection deficit of more than P2.7 billion but the shortfall was reduced to P1.3 billion as a result of the more than P1.4-billion excess collection posted by the Large Taxpayer Service (LTS), a special audit division in the national office.