https://mb.com.ph/
The Philippine government has been losing billions of money as the bulk of the country’s mineral production from small-scale mining – mainly gold – are still being sold straight to the black market, a Philippine Institute of Development Studies (PIDS) research showed.
The government think tank made this assumption largely on the basis that small scale miners sell their gold to the informal sector instead of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).
But PIDS also said there is still no way for the government to measure the contribution of small-scale mining to the economy because most of its output is leaked through the black market.
According to PIDS, the main factor why small scale miners prefer the black market is the imposition of tax on gold production of small-scale mining in 2010 by BSP and Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR).
PIDS said this “led to unintended consequences” and resulted in BSP’s gold purchases drastically falling from 28.56 metric tons (MT) in 2010 to 0.95 metric tons in 2012.
For the rest of this article: https://mb.com.ph/2020/08/28/ph-govt-losing-mineral-resources-to-black-market/