That the pandemic upended industries is no secret. Many businesses have either shuttered or are still struggling to stem their losses over a year into various levels of quarantine. A new study says, however, that it’s not all bad news for many entrepreneurs.
Nearly 33 percent of all online taxpayers reported their incomes rising by as much as 144 percent in 2020, according to data collected by Taxumo, a Filipino startup that makes it simple for people to file and pay their taxes via a web-based platform.
However, about 67.1 percent of taxpayers using Taxumo declared that their income decreased by 49 percent last year.
Collectively, incomes fell by 22.8 percent, with total taxes Taxumo remitted to the Bureau of Internal Revenue in 2021 at P11.313 million versus 2020’s P14.652 million.
The startup found that the number of “poor” taxpayers—or those earning less than P9,520 per month according to the Philippine Institute for Development Studies—using the Taxumo platform decreased from 28 percent last year to 23 percent this year, while low-income (earning between P19,040 and P38,080 per month) and mid-middle income (earning between P38,080 and P66,640 per month) taxpayers grew by 9.8 percent and five percent respectively.
Meanwhile, rich taxpayers (or those who earned at least P190,400 per month), which were 4.5 percent of Taxumo’s population in 2020, totally disappeared in 2021.
In addition, online women taxpayers declared a whopping 86 percent decrease in their income during the past year, which is a strong indication of just how much the pandemic has affected this vulnerable segment of the population.
On the flip side, the study indicated that non-binary users (or those who identify neither as male nor female) reported a 52 percent increase in their declared income. According to a Taxumo rep, about 76.5 percent of non-binary users are from Generation Alpha, or those born in the early 2010s, while 74.7 percent of women users are millennials, or those born from 1980 to 1994.
Study Says One-Third of Online Taxpayers' Income Rose During Pandemic
