The Bureau of Internal Revenue said Sunday it will file criminal charges against local government executives who refuse to turn over hundreds of millions of pesos in withholding taxes collected from their employees.

Revenue Commissioner Joel L. Tan-Torres did not identify the erring officials but said they were mostly mayors and governors, some of them from Metro Manila.

He said some heads and treasurers of government-owned business enterprises were also guilty of the same offense.

The BIR chief made the threat of filing criminal charges, particularly estafa, against the concerned officials after some local treasurers complained that their mayors and governors refused to sign the checks they had prepared for the payment of the liabilities to the national government.

Insiders said the racket is not new, saying that some local officials have been treating the withholding taxes as their own and using them to finance local projects.

They cited the case of a former Caloocan City mayor who recently agreed to pay the city’s unremitted taxes by installment, arguing the debts were incurred by his predecessor.

The BIR could not say how much withholding taxes have remained uncollected but said they could reach the P1 billion mark based on reports from the Commission on Audit which found the unremitted taxes in the books of many local government units.