A ruling from the Court of Tax Appeals (CTA) awarding a refund is a milestone for any taxpayer. Yet, as tax practitioner Eleanor Lucas Roque recounts, such a decision is a long way from becoming the actual cash a client needs.

In a BusinessWorld column published on November 2, 2026, Roque, a Principal for the Tax Advisory & Compliance practice area at P&A Grant Thornton, describes a refund process that can take five to six years from the time a claim is filed with the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), through the CTA, to the Supreme Court, and then back to the BIR. Some cases may be resolved sooner, she notes, while others can take considerably longer.

A ten-year wait for a P20-million refund

Roque recalls receiving her first CTA decision awarding a client's refund claim as a young lawyer — a moment she describes as feeling so victorious that she wanted to frame the decision and hang it on her wall.

In one case, she filed a claim for a P20-million refund with the CTA in 2015, and the check was finally issued in 2025. It took ten years before she could hand the check to the client. By the time the money became available, ten years of inflation had caught up with it: the P20 million in cash was worth only P14 million in 2025, according to her account.

And that, she stresses, is only the inflation cost. Along the way came CTA filing fees, lawyers' fees, independent CPA fees, and the less visible costs of producing the required evidence.

The result, she argues, is a significant disconnect between a taxpayer's legal entitlement to a refund and the economic value of what it eventually receives. A taxpayer can spend years, and millions of pesos in professional and litigation costs, to finally win in court — only to struggle through appeals and administrative processes before receiving the actual refund.

Appealing past the point of execution

In that case, Roque says she felt supremely lucky that the BIR did not appeal the CTA Division decision. The writ of execution was issued in 2018, and three years of litigation struck her as an amazingly short time to finally obtain the refund check.

However, the BIR challenged the execution all the way to the Supreme Court, and a series of denied appeals took another five years.

Roque says she cannot really blame the government's lawyers, who are required to defend the case. Still, she suggests it may be time for the government and the BIR to establish mechanisms to determine when to stop appealing a refund case. A court-awarded tax refund, she emphasizes, is not a government concession; it is the return of money to a taxpayer who has established, through blood, sweat and tears, that it is entitled to recover. The real question, therefore, is not merely whether the law allows a refund, but whether the refund system allows taxpayers to recover their money while it still has meaningful economic value.

Administrative gains, judicial uncertainty

Recent tax reforms have attempted to address delays at the administrative level, and Roque acknowledges that the administrative refund process has definitely improved, allowing refunds to be claimed within a year from filing — certainly an improvement, in her view. But in less fortunate cases, an administrative deadline addresses only the beginning of the process. Once a refund reaches the courts, the timeline becomes far less predictable.

A refund case may be filed with the CTA Division. It may then move to the CTA En Banc and, ultimately, reach the Supreme Court through a petition for review on certiorari.

This creates what Roque describes as an unusual commercial calculation. The question for the taxpayer is no longer simply whether it is legally entitled to the refund. It also becomes whether the refund is large enough to justify the cost and the years required to recover it.

Winning is not the same as getting paid

Perhaps the more frustrating part of the process, she writes, comes after the taxpayer has already won. A final court victory does not necessarily translate into immediate cash. The judgment must still be executed, and the taxpayer must then undertake an arduous clearance process within the BIR.

From a taxpayer's perspective, this is particularly difficult to understand. Once a judgment has become final and executory, the legal question of entitlement should already have been settled. It should, in her view, be separated from any liability or open case the taxpayer has pending with the BIR.

Should delayed refunds bear interest?

This leads Roque to what she frames as a legitimate policy question: if the government retains money that is eventually determined by final judgment to belong to the taxpayer, should the government bear some of the economic cost of an extended delay? Without any negative consequence for the BIR, she asks, what would stop it from delaying the return of cash to the taxpayer?

The concept is hardly novel. Other tax jurisdictions already recognize the time value of taxpayers' money and allow taxpayers to recover interest for delayed refunds.

By contrast, when taxpayers fail to pay taxes when due, the Philippine Tax Code imposes 12% annual interest on the unpaid amount, on top of a 25%-50% surcharge and other penalties. To Roque, this reflects an economic reality familiar to every business: money has a time value.

That economic reality, she argues, does not disappear when the positions are reversed. When a taxpayer has spent years establishing its entitlement to a refund, receiving the deflated value at the end of the process does not necessarily make it economically whole. An effective refund system must ensure that the refund remains meaningful when the taxpayer finally receives it.

A futile legal victory

Roque closes by returning to her early career: as a young lawyer, she wanted to frame that first favorable decision. Today, she says, the real victory is not the decision on the wall, but the cash in the client's hands, received while it can still make a difference. A refund that comes too late, she concludes, may be nothing but a futile legal victory.

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Eleanor Lucas Roque is a Principal for the Tax Advisory & Compliance practice area at P&A Grant Thornton. This article was originally published by BusinessWorld on November 2, 2026 under the title “Tax refunds: From court filing to cash”: Tax refunds: From court filing to cash