Taxes made simple

What taxes are and why they exist

Taxes are payments that people and businesses make to the government. They are the main way a country pays for things everyone shares, like roads, public schools, hospitals, and the people who run them. In the Philippines, most national taxes, income tax, VAT, excise tax, are collected by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), while a separate set of taxes, like real property tax and local business permit fees, is collected by your own city or municipal government to fund things closer to home, like garbage collection and barangay services.