T

he internal control department of the Tax Directorate General, already strengthened by a whistle-blowing system, is utterly ineffective in discouraging tax officials from indulging in corruption, as demonstrated by the latest affront to the public on Wednesday.

A Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) team caught two tax auditors red-handed as they accepted the equivalent of US$250,000 in Singapore dollar notes from a steel company employee at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport's parking lot.

Earlier last month, a junior tax official was caught accepting a plastic bag containing Rp 25 million (US$2,500) at Gambir railway station. This turned out to be a tiny fraction of a bribe worth hundreds of millions of rupiah from a corporate taxpayer.

The costs of committing corruption in the tax directorate general remain very low as thieving tax officials still see the chance of being caught as very slim.

In April 2010, then finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati was rudely awakened by a series of tax embezzlements and bribes by junior tax auditor Gayus Tambunan. She ordered the Financial Transactions and Report and Analysis Center (PPATK) to monitor the flow of money through bank accounts of 15,000 officials involved in tax assessment, and their spouses, as part of a concerted drive to clean up tax offices and nail corrupt officials.

Involving the politically independent PPATK (usually know in other countries as the 'financial intelligence' unit) to examine officials' bank accounts then checking against annual income tax returns was thought to be effective in uncovering whether they were hiding part of their assets or owned ill-gotten wealth.

Examining officials' annual tax returns will not capture the whole picture of their actual income because they could understate the tax due on their real income with fake documents.

Only by checking their bank accounts and verifying them with their annual tax returns will the internal control department be able to verify whether officials are crooks or not.

But alas, it has now been more than three years since PPATK was told to examine these accounts and crosscheck the findings with the tax returns, and we have not heard anything with regard to the findings of the investigation.

The Tax Directorate General has always been perceived as one of the most corrupt public institutions in the country and this perception has been relentlessly validated by the lifestyles of many tax officials.

This negative perception will persist as long as the results of the PPATK examination are not revealed and followed up.

Tax laws mandate only tax officials to audit annual tax returns. The question now is how the Directorate General can convince the public of the credibility of an audit of its own officials if it can't be transparent about the PPATK examination.