W

e support the demonstrations on Tuesday by an estimated 400 officials of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) who poured out their frustrations over the government'€™s pathetic attitude toward the weakening of the anticorruption drive and the bashing of the KPK over the past two months.

The demonstrations were triggered by the decision of the KPK leaders to stop processing the corruption case against Comr. Gen Budi Gunawan and hand over it to the Attorney General'€™s Office (AGO), whose institutional integrity is perceived as much lower than that of the KPK. They are afraid the AGO would eventually drop the case within the detested framework of political compromises.

As graft busters who grapple daily with various cases of corruption, KPK officials know for sure that Budi'€™s corruption case is air-tight, rooted in alleged money laundering practices whereby a suspect or defendant is treated with the presumption of guilt. That is because within the framework of the 2002 Money-Laundering Law, the indictment is virtually the verdict as the burden of proof lies on the shoulder of the suspect or defendant.

Unfortunately, the campaign to debilitate the KPK and the weakening of the national movement against graft is occurring when the estimated 25 million corporate and individual taxpayers are preparing their 2014 income tax returns, which they have to file before the March 31 deadline.

The bashing of the KPK will hurt the government program to expand the tax base and achieve its tax revenue target of 16 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019, much higher than the current 12 percent, which is the lowest in the ASEAN region.

All over the world, stronger law enforcement alone is never enough to encourage tax compliance. Tax efforts should be undertaken as a campaign to nurture a high level of tax culture, which is key to voluntary tax compliance because there would never be enough auditors in the government payroll to examine taxpayers'€™ returns.

About 20 million people have now been registered as individual income tax payers and this number will increase steadily in line with the higher capacity of the tax system to net new taxpayers.

True, strong law enforcement would help develop voluntary tax compliance by making the cost of tax evasion and non-filing of tax returns very costly to taxpayers. People will fulfill their tax obligations if they know that their chance of being caught by tax officials and auditors is high.

But voluntary tax compliance, which is prompted more by the willingness of people to pay income taxes, is influenced more by the public'€™s perception of the integrity of tax officials, the efficiency of the tax administration and the government'€™s credibility in general, rather than by repressive measures.

A high degree of voluntary tax compliance (tax culture) requires a climate of mutual trust between taxpayers and tax officials and the public'€™s perception of clean government. Here lies the crucial importance of the anticorruption drive.

But this prerequisite is now being damaged by the bashing of the KPK, so far the most trusted and most powerful and capable corruption buster in the country.

If the public perceives the government is highly tolerant of corruption, taxpayers may simply ask themselves why they have to pay taxes if most of the money will eventually end up in the pockets of corrupt officials. Taxpayers will go all out to find any loopholes within the taxation system to avoid and to evade taxes.

President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo, who used integrity and clean government as the main pillars of his election platform last year, must also realize the close relationship between taxation and democracy. The more aware the people are of their civic duty as taxpayers, the more assertive they will be with regard to their rights.

As US political thinker Harry L. Hopkins, the architect of the New Deal, which was crafted to cope with the Great Depression in the 1930s, once said, '€œwe shall tax and tax, spend and spend and elect and elect.'€

The rationale is that there is no taxation without representation as citizens demand something '€” either in the form of public services or a stronger say in political decisions on resource allocation '€” in return for increased taxation.

As government dependence on tax receipts from the people has increased, so has the interaction between the state and society, forcing the government to be more responsible to its citizens.

This development will exert a political impact as more and more people will see themselves not merely as citizens or '€governed people'€ but as taxpayers who pay the government and its personnel. Further down the road, this also requires civil servants to change their mindset from the ones who regard themselves as the dispensers of free public services to those responsible for serving the ones who pay for the government'€™s operations.

Concerted campaigns by the taxation directorate general and generous incentives offered to registered taxpayers have succeeded in attracting almost 20 million voluntary taxpayer registrations.

Government regulations have created so many disadvantages for individuals without taxpayer registration numbers that even employees, whose income tax is already withheld by their employers, voluntarily registered themselves to get taxpayer identification cards.

However, the dramatic increase in the number of registered taxpayers will not automatically increase income tax filing, unless the government steadily improves the public'€™s perception of its integrity, as reflected in clean government and high standards of fiscal accountability.