This case has been cited 1 times or more.
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2006-10-31 |
CHICO-NAZARIO, J. |
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| In Collector of Internal Revenue v. Suyoc Consolidated Mining Company,[24] the Court weighed the considerable time spent by the BIR to actually conduct the reinvestigations requested by the taxpayer in deciding that the prescription period was suspended during this time. Because of such requests, several reinvestigations were made and a hearing was even held by the Conference Staff organized in the collection office to consider claims of such nature which, as the record shows, lasted for several months. After inducing petitioner to delay collection as he in fact did, it is most unfair for respondent to now take advantage of such desistance to elude his deficiency income tax liability to the prejudice of the Government invoking the technical ground of prescription. Although the Court used the term "requests for reconsideration" in reference to the letters sent by the taxpayer in the case of Querol v. Collector of Internal Revenue,[25] it took into account the reinvestigation conducted soon after these letters were received and the revised assessment that resulted from the reinvestigations. It is true that the Collector revised the original assessment on February 9, 1955; and appellant avers that this revision was invalid in that it was not made within the five-year prescriptive period provided by law (Collector vs. Pineda, 112 Phil. 321). But that fact is that the revised assessment was merely a result of petitioner Querol's requests for reconsideration of the original assessment, contained in his letters of December 14, 1951 and May 25, 1953. The records of the Bureau of Internal Revenue show that after receiving the letters, the Bureau conducted a reinvestigation of petitioner's tax liabilities, and, in fact, sent a tax examiner to San Fernando, La Union, for that purpose; that because of the examiner's report, the Bureau revised the original assessment, x x x. In other words, the reconsideration was granted in part, and the original assessment was altered. Consequently, the period between the petition for reconsideration and the revised assessment should be subtracted from the total prescriptive period (Republic vs. Ablaza, 108 Phil 1105). The Court, in Republic v. Lopez,[26] even gave a detailed accounting of the time the BIR spent for each reinvestigation in order to deduct it from the five-year period set at that time in the statute of limitations: It is now a settled ruled in our jurisdiction that the five-year prescriptive period fixed by Section 332(c) of the Internal Revenue Code within which the Government may sue to collect an assessed tax is to be computed from the last revised assessment resulting from a reinvestigation asked for by the taxpayer and (2) that where a taxpayer demands a reinvestigation, the time employed in reinvestigating should be deducted from the total period of limitation. | |||||