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A lesson from Gayus
Gayus Tambunan is just an ordinary member of staff at the tax office
G
ayus Tambunan is just an ordinary member of staff at the tax office. But, as a civil servant, he has extraordinary amount of money in his bank accounts.
The court found him guilty of corruption but only slapped him on the wrist, handing him the minimum sentence, which allowed him to keep his job as a government official.
How could a 30-year-old tax officer, with only a college level education, accrue Rp 25 billion in his account and so smoothly sidestep the legal ramifications?
This is a big question that everyone should be asking, and is even more interesting for a civil servant like me, who works in the same government sector.
Of course, this is a question for the judiciary to answer. But we the public, and civil servants in particular, should not just close eyes and forget about the whole episode, there are several lessons to be learned.
First, it is not necessary to be high up the chain of command to commit large-scale corruption. Every single level of bureaucracy plays a role that can be bought for a price. Relatively minor cases of corruption can easily snowball into a large, and even huge crimes.
The more you commit small-scale corruption, and the longer you convince yourself that the crime is petty and insignificant, the more you will blind yourself the massive crime it has grown into.
Second, a corrupt tax officer such as Gayus, is not obliged to report his wealth. And, as his position would require, is skilled at filing his own annual tax return, ensuring that nothing can be traced back to him. Only backtracking along the money trail can expose crimes of this nature. So, this principle should be considered to uncover tax crimes and discourage tax officers from committing fraud.
Third, to be able to commit corruption on a scale like this an individual must be in close contact with the source of the money, which in this case is the taxpayers.
The closer they are to the source, the bigger opportunity they have to skim money from the top.
Fourth, Gayus’s family must be very dependent on him to not speak up, even after significant changes to their lifestyles.
Corrupt individuals poison their families and friends with hot money. Once they are poisoned, those
corrupt individuals have lost one of their most important moral compasses.
Six, committing corruption is similar to taking drugs. Once started, it is difficult to escape. Once you pay a tax officer with bribe you are in his debt.
They will return seeking more. If you do pay, they will disclose your crimes, and vice versa. Once a tax inspector deals with a shady business player or consultant, he will become addicted to them and their easy money.
There are many other lessons to be learned from this case. But the most important thing to be considered by high-ranking officials is that they need to review their perception of who is capable of corruption.
According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) anticorruption handbook, corruption stems from a mixture of authority, low integrity and a lack of transparency and accountability.
It is the nature of government agencies, especially tax agencies, to have authority. Therefore, the only way to reduce corruption is by strengthening the agency’s integrity and improving transparency and accountability.
So far, bureaucracy reform programs have mostly focused on improving integrity and accountability, leaving behind measures on improving transparency. Improving integrity is the hardest and most time-consuming reform because it is related to human behavior.
Improving accountability is often slow because of massive shifts in culture of large organizations. Consequently, the simultaneous improvement of transparency must take place to empower bureaucracy reform.
The biggest burden to improving the transparency of the Finance Ministry are the laws and policies preventing the regular audit of transactions made by the Supreme Audit Agency. It is not wise to let only God and the tax office have full control of tax transactions.
Particularly if we consider that the audit agency is also a government agency that handles taxpayers’ secrets. The tax office should have the right to examine the trail of money from the tax office up to the Tax Dispute Court.
Another measure to promote transparency would be to disclose all procedures of tax payments and provide a comprehensive guide to the taxpayer.
The consultation must be made free of charge. This self assessment principle will allow taxpayers to declare and pay their own taxes. Without such measures, taxpayers will only continue to fall victim to bad tax consultants and end up making deals with tax officers like Gayus.
The writer is a former customs inspector at the Finance Ministry and currently a PhD student at the CTH, Göteborg, Sweden. These are his personal views.
