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Tax office to access credit card holder info, transaction data
The Finance Ministry has issued a regulation requiring banks to report credit card customer information and transaction data, in a move seen as a way to raise Indonesiaâs low individual taxpayer base
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The Finance Ministry has issued a regulation requiring banks to report credit card customer information and transaction data, in a move seen as a way to raise Indonesia's low individual taxpayer base.
The regulation, issued on Wednesday, orders 23 banks that offer credit card services to submit the data to the ministry's directorate general of taxation starting from May 31 at the latest. The banks include local and foreign lending giants, such as Bank Central Asia (BCA), Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI), Citibank and HSBC.
Banks have expressed concerns that under the new regulation, their customers' data would be used by the tax office to crosscheck spending with incomes stated on tax receipts.
'Of course there will be an impact on customers, meaning that the data will be used to crosscheck if their spending fits with their income reports,' BNI president director Achmad Baiquni said, acknowledging that he was yet to read the Finance Minister Regulation (PMK).
However, bank officials said they would comply with the regulation as it did not breach customer data confidentiality stipulations in the Banking Law. Credit card transactions are not covered by the principle of banking secrecy, which only protects the privacy of customers' deposits.
'We cannot defy the order,' BCA president director Jahja Setiaatmadja said. However, he added that customers would probably feel a sense of apprehension about the new regulation and might consider shifting to credit cards offered by foreign banks.
There were 23.9 million credit card transactions nationwide in January, covering a total Rp 22.9 trillion (US$1.72 billion) worth of transactions. In the same month there were 16.8 million active credit cards in the country, according to Bank Indonesia data.
Tax experts said that seeing credit card users' patterns of consumption would be especially useful in helping the tax office increase revenues from individual taxpayers.
Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro aims to double revenues from individual taxpayers this year to Rp 18 trillion, a mere 1 percent of the overall tax revenue target of Rp 1.36 quadrillion. There are only 27 million registered taxpayers in the country's 250 million population.
The government has been working to boost tax revenues this year after it failed to meet its tax revenue target in 2015. Bambang has set sights on individual taxpayers this year as their tax payments are considered to be more immune to economic slowdown compared with corporate taxpayers.
Center for Indonesia Taxation Analysis (CITA) executive director Yustinus Prastowo said that the tax office should upgrade its digital technology so that manual crosschecks would not be necessary for the credit card data.
'There should be an integrated system in which credit card holders can be taxed automatically for each transaction they make, because both the tax office and banks will be burdened by manual data comparison,' Prastowo said.
University of Indonesia tax expert Gunadi said a more automated scheme could help the tax office reduce standard data checks in the future, including the possibility of revoking tax numbers (NPWP) and yearly tax assessments (SPT) as all data would be stored and accessed electronically.
