Aside from outright income generating objectives, Jardiolin called foundations “tax shelters.”

For instance, corporate funds spent on Gawad Kalinga projects or scholarships are tax deductible.

Indeed, according to Fely Soledad, Executive Director of the Philippine Council for NGO Certification, one chief advantage of setting up a foundation is tax exemption, on top of improving a company’s relation with the government and reducing regulatory intervention.

Another integral part of a “strategic” CSR program is “reporting.” On this subject, Jardiolin maintained that “only saints do their work anonymously and only saints do not have cost-benefit ratios.”

She said it would be “naïve” to expect “profit-oriented entities” such as businesses to do charitable work in secrecy. One of its twin objectives, after all, is improving company image to the public.

For this reason, companies spend huge sums of money on grandiose, often tearjerkers of advertisements, principally aimed at publicizing its efforts in society. Winkett went as far as saying that companies should “drive the media” to ensure that consumers know that the company is doing something.

Filling in the gap

In the Philippine CSR Report 2007, Marilou Erni, President of the League of Corporate Foundations and Executive Director of Petron Foundation, revealed that the private sector’s total expenditure for poverty reduction increased from P7.6 billion ($166,156,536 at an exchange rate of $1=P45.74) from 1997 to 2002 to P12 billion ($262,353,426) from 2002 to 2006. Almost half of this amount, or over P9 billion ($196,764,320) went to human services development, including education.

The resurgence of CSR programs by companies in the country is indicative of the weakness of the government that is supposed to provide basic services to the people. The fields where most companies focus on are the same areas in society that lacked government support. As a case in point, the start of the crisis in basic education saw the outpouring of over P9 billion ($196,764,320) from the private sector.

It is unclear, however, why the same corporations that constantly harp on the need for the business sector to contribute to society via poverty alleviation and education continue to oppose genuine moves to do so in a much grander scale.

In the same manner, the same companies that publicize granting hundreds of scholarships to children from poor families are the same ones that tirelessly lobby to block any increase in the minimum wage and practice repressive labor policies such as union-busting and contractualization.

In the end, experts in the field admit that the CSR phenomenon is primarily a business tool, a marketing strategy with the primary purpose of generating a return on investment via juxtaposing the company’s name and image with seemingly socially responsible activities. Rigorous, and at times false, publicity of their altruistic projects, however, leads people to believe that, for once, companies have something else other than profit on their agenda. Philippine Collegian/Posted by Bulatlat

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