A local supplier of goods and services include those who are engaged in business or exercise of profession with whom the taxpayer has transacted for at least 6 transactions, regardless of the amount per transaction. Although a casual purchase is exempt, a single purchase which involves P10,000 or more shall be subject to withholding tax.

To implement the above provisions of RR 11-2018, the BIR issued Revenue Memorandum Order (RMO) 26-2018, prescribing guidelines in monitoring and identifying who these “top withholding agents” (TWAs) are. The RMO identifies TWAs to include:

Existing top taxpayers classified and notified by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue as any of the following:

– Large taxpayers

– Top 20,000 private corporations

– Top 5,000 individual taxpayers

– Taxpayers newly identified and included as medium taxpayers, and those under the Taxpayer Account Management Program.

Recently, the BIR has changed the rules on the determination of TWAs as defined under RMO 26-2018. Under RR 7-2019, TWAs are now simply referred to as “taxpayers whose gross sales/receipts, or gross purchases, or claimed deductible itemized expenses, as the case may be, amounted to TWELVE MILLION PESOS (P12,000,000) during the preceding taxable year.”

What about taxpayers who have previously been identified as TWAs? RR 7-2019 states that “Taxpayers who are classified as top withholding agents prior to the effectivity of these Regulations shall remain as such until failure to satisfy the aforesaid criteria and duly published as delisted from the existing list of top withholding agents.”

If you visit the BIR website, www.bir.gov.ph, there is a link “Top Taxpayers” on the right-hand side of the page. Click on that, and it will bring you to another link, “Top Withholding Agents,” which contains the two main TWA lists, one, published on Oct. 8, 2018, and a supplemental list published on March 18, 2019. The lists are further broken down into individual and non-individual taxpayers. Further down the line, the lists are divided into taxpayers who have been added as a TWA, as well as those that have been delisted.
So, to summarize:

If your name appears on either the two TWA lists (Oct. 8, 2018 list and March 18, 2019 list), and you have not been delisted from the existing list of top withholding agents, you still remain as a TWA;

If your name has been delisted in the TWA list subsequent to the March 18, 2019 list, you are no longer a TWA.

If your name appears in the TWA list subsequent to the March 18, 2019 list, you are a TWA.

As a taxpayer is considered to have been notified by the BIR as of the date of the publication of the list, the obligation of TWAs to withhold the 1 percent withholding tax for a supplier of goods and 2 percent withholding tax for a supplier of service shall commence on the first day of the month following the month of publication.

Manila Times Source