By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

WHEN I returned from a vacation abroad with my bag full of new books I had bought years ago, a customs person at the airport examined my bags and looked at me quizzically. What did I do abroad, she asked. I was on vacation, I answered. She scratched her head and then said irritably: If you were on vacation, why did you bring books with you?

This anecdote comes to mind with something that really bothers the book lover in me. Several people much smarter than me have commented on this issue recently, with my personal favorite being Manolo Quezon’s May 4 column in the Inquirer. He said it perfectly, so I’ll quote him:

“The policy of our government seems to be the exact opposite: to put the squeeze on citizens in order to add to government coffers depleted by electioneering expenses. Over at McSweeney’s is an entry by Robin Hemley, the director of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program who’s in the Philippines on a Guggenheim Fellowship. In ‘The Great Book Blockade of 2009,” he details the creativity of Filipino bureaucrats like Customs Undersecretary Espele Sales.

According to Hemley, the situation developed this way. Stephenie Meyer’s novel ‘Twilight’ apparently did so well in the bookstores that the number of copies being imported attracted the attention of a Customs official. Examiner Rene Agulan decreed that duties be paid. It seems that the importer of the book reacted in a manner familiar to most book lovers in the country: to eliminate the hassle, the importer complied with the Customs levy on the title.

Hemley says surrendering to the authorities was a mistake because the Philippines, back in 1952, became a signatory to the Florence Agreement, a United Nations treaty that mandates the tax-free importation of books in order to facilitate the free flow of “educational, scientific, and cultural materials.” The importer’s submission to the whims of Customs whetted the Bureau’s appetite; they put a squeeze on all book importations by air. The result? For two months virtually no imported books entered the country.

Not least because it seems book sellers had the gumption to challenge the government. Enter Undersecretary Espele Sales whose PowerPoint presentation to booksellers Hemley describes as ‘Orwellian,’ because of an essay in which Orwell examined how officials twist words to suit their purposes.

Take the official’s interpretation of the following sentence in RA 8047 (the Book Publishing Industry Development Act): ‘the tax and duty-free importation of books or raw materials to be used in book publishing.’ According to Sales, this lacked a comma after the word ‘books,’ which meant that what was tax and duty-free was only books used for book publishing.

People in the book industry were left scratching their heads, wondering what a ‘book used in book publishing’ is. Customs went further and said it interpreted the Florence Agreement to mean only educational books are tax-free, with Customs deciding whether a title qualifies as being educational or not. Booksellers responded that this went against half a century’s common understanding of the treaty; did this mean everyone had been wrong and Customs suddenly right? Sales replied, ‘Yes.’”

Succinct and sad. There’s no other way to say this: It is disgraceful of the Bureau of Customs to apply this ridiculous reasoning to taxing books. Now, I’m vehemently against the taxing of any books regardless of the reason. I have a long list of complaints about the Post Office’s delight at taxing books. But this reason, and the way it’s been applied and justified, is embarrassing. It taints the entire government. Taking advantage because people want to read books? Reading is a bad thing? Just because you can’t properly collect customs and duties due to incompetence or bad policy doesn’t mean you should make it up by milking the honest people who do pay their taxes. And this woman who decided to reinterpret the Florence Agreement to suit the government’s purpose? She needs to read more. Or maybe that’s exactly the problem.

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