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Tax office for the haves to be launched
The creme de la creme of Indonesian earners will soon have a special place to hand over their money, exclusively designed and built by the government: a new tax office for the haves
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The creme de la creme of Indonesian earners will soon have a special place to hand over their money, exclusively designed and built by the government: a new tax office for the haves.
Expected to be launched in April, the new branch office in Gambir, Central Jakarta, is designed to serve high-wealth individual taxpayers, tax office chief Darmin Nasution said late Wednesday.
The office will be next door to the existing large taxpayers' office (LTO), which serves the country's more than 200 top corporate taxpayers.
"We've listed 1,200 individual taxpayers [the selection of which is taken] from a combination of news, papers, and other documents," Darmin said.
He added the tax office listed the 1,200 taxpayers based on their assets, and not their income, because the latter category was not really representative.
"[From the point of] income, they may not be categorized as high-wealth individuals. But their assets are everywhere," he said.
Darmin added the tax office for the time being only listed high-wealth individuals living in Jakarta, simply because most of the haves lived in the country's capital.
"All of them are businesspeople," he added.
Indonesian cigarette baron Michael Hartono and his brother R. Budi Hartono, along with paper tycoon Sukanto Tanoto, palm oil magnate Martua Sitorus and telecoms and retail king Peter Sondakh will likely be among the people targeted by the tax office to be listed in the new office.
The five men were named among the richest people in the world in 2009 by Forbes magazine.
The Hartono brothers, who own cigarette company PT Djarum, each have assets worth US$1.7 billion. Sukanto, the owner of Raja Garuda Mas International — a holding company with activities ranging from paper, palm oil, construction and energy — has assets worth $1.6 billion.
Darmin said the tax office would check the names of rich people as reported in the media.
He added that despite having billions in assets, many rich people often evaded paying taxes.
"Most of them don't comply with our [regulations]. We want to fix this, so that they pay the right amount of taxes," Darmin said.
The tax office is now shifting its attention to increasing the amount of tax paid by individual taxpayers. Prior to this, corporate tax revenue far outweighed individual tax revenue, he added.
"During a crisis, if corporate taxpayers go broke, they can't pay taxes," Darmin said.
"But individual taxpayers will keep paying taxes as long as they have an income."
To provide better services for these high-wealth individual taxpayers, the tax office is pre-paring selected tax employees to be placed at the new office, said tax office spokesman Djoko Slamet Surjoputro.
"We're mapping our employees, based on exams, key performance index, recommendations from their superordinates, educational background and track records," he said.
"The scoring will be clear."
Indonesia has 12.7 million registered taxpayers, about 8 million of them corporate.
