Amusement tax

A tax collected by provinces and highly urbanised cities on the money taken at the cinema window. The detail that decides everything is that it applies to gross receipts from admissions, not to anybody’s profit, so it is charged before a producer recovers a peso of what the film cost. It falls on the imported film and the domestic one at the same rate, which sounds even until you notice that only one of them has already earned its money somewhere else.

Under the Local Government Code the ceiling was 30 percent. It came down to 10 percent in 2009, after more than two decades of attempts, and Congress has since noted that some local governments kept levying above the ceiling anyway. In Metro Manila the tax on Filipino films is currently suspended for most of the year, which is relief that is temporary, local, revocable by resolution, and excludes the Christmas fortnight when the money actually is.

Source: Republic Act 7160, the Local Government Code of 1991, Section 140(a), which authorises the tax at not more than 30 percent of gross receipts from admission fees; amended by Republic Act 9640, which lowered the ceiling to not more than 10 percent and lapsed into law on 21 May 2009 without the President’s signature, https://lawphil.net/statutes/repacts/ra2009/ra_9640_2009.html . The statute also requires the tax to be withheld before receipts are divided between exhibitors and distributors, and it does not fix that split, which is why the commonly circulated “30 percent government, 58 percent split” figure is unverified and unused in this course.

First used in: 3.5 · Freedom came, the audience did not