Marilen Reyes, 30 years old, is a single mother to
her 10-year old daughter, Sheila. She got
married right after college to her high school sweetheart, Ben, but after 5
years of marriage, she discovered that Ben was having an affair with another
woman. Though she tried to work it out
with him, Ben decided to leave her and her daughter. At the start, he was sending some money regularly
for Sheila’s schooling but, lately, his financial support has stopped.
It is a good thing that Marilen has been a working mother from
the start of their marriage. She was able to save some money when they were still a double-income family but, ever since she became a single parent, finances became tight, especially during enrollment time. It is then a blessing for her to belong to a company which provides for interest-free education loan for dependents. However, she is quite anxious about the future when Sheila goes to college.
Marilen currently works for
one of the top Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firms in the country as a
business performance analyst. She has a
monthly salary of P50,000 and with this, she earns an annual income of P700,000,
broken down as follows:
Annual salary P600,000
Bonuses 100,000
Total P700,000
She has heard about the tax reform issue from a young team
mate of hers, Kiko. He has a college buddy,
JAL, who shared with him a template for computing the amount of over-collected taxes
from his annual salary. Kiko then shared
the template with the rest of his team mates, including Marilen.
Using the template from Kiko, this is what she came up with:
She noted that, under the current tax system, her Effective
Tax Rate (ETR) is 26%. This means that a
little more than ¼ of her pay goes to taxes!
Based also on the template, had the tax brackets
been adjusted from their 1997 level, her ETR should just be 20% -- which means
a huge tax savings of 6%, equivalent to P30,410 per year. How she wished that the amount of
over-collected taxes could have gone instead to a college
fund for Sheila!
That is why when Kiko shared with their team the
#BlackPaydayFriday protest last October 30, she did not hesitate to wear black
that day in work and joined her team mates for a groufie while holding
#TaxReformNow signs. By joining that protest, her one big hope
is that she will be able to put aside more of her take-home pay for Sheila’s
future, rather than simply overpaying for taxes to a Government which never really gave much support to single parents, like her.
May magagawa kayang pagbabago sa tax system ang Gobyerno
para sa mga single parent katulad ni Marilen?
Abangan!
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