Cooperatives are social enterprises that provide social services to the poor.  These are social services that the government should have provided us - capital for small businesses, training for values and leadership, loans with low interest and with minimal documentation for immediate financial needs, cheaper goods for everyday needs, insurance and medical care at affordable cost, decent housing, and others.

Tax exemption of Cooperatives is a social justice measure and can never be considered as fiscal incentive to business. Despite this privilege, cooperatives are in fact tax makers by delivering into the government treasury some P4 billion a year thru the taxes collected from over half-a million of their employees. Apart from the taxes collected, around 1.9 million people are indirectly employed in the cooperative sector.

Cooperatives are voluntary organizations of people who want to improve their economic lives by their own initiatives and using their own resources. Coops are instruments of equity, social justice and economic development.

Removing Tax exemptions of  Cooperatives will deprive poor people the only organization that knows their conditions and which provide them what they need,

We are the real partner of government in poverty alleviation doing it on our own.

Cooperatives are now with more than 14 million individual members and are organized all over the country in 24,000 cooperative organizations.