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ndonesia is looking this week to pass a controversial tax amnesty bill that will reward tax evaders, but at the expense of those who have met their tax obligations.

Objections and protests have fallen on deaf ears and the government and House of Representatives lawmakers have proceeded with the bill. Now the deliberation is coming to an end, one year after the issue surfaced.

Whether the House will pass the bill that the government is relying on to plug the budget deficit, the draft law is clearly unfair in the first place, and for several reasons.

First, living up to its name, the bill seeks to induce tax evaders to come clean about their assets and to pardon their tax mistakes through various schemes and redemption rates imposed on them.

The latest development of the deliberation has found that the redemption rates will range from 2 percent to 10 percent of undeclared wealth, depending on the time period of the implementation.

As if those rates were not low enough, the government says that it will impose even lower rates to entice rich individuals to repatriate their funds.

However, we are talking about individuals who have cost the state billions, if not trillions, of rupiah in losses every year because they evade paying taxes and fail to report their wealth properly though various dubious means.

The Jakarta Post reported in 2014 that one of those means, namely falsification of tax invoices to alter tax obligations, was estimated to have inflicted Rp 1.5 trillion (US$112.81 million) in losses on the state since 2008.

No official data are available regarding the sums that Indonesia has lost from unpaid tax. However, we can use the current tax ratio of 12.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) as a simple calculation base.

Last year, the government reaped Rp 1.06 quadrillion in tax revenues and claimed that the ratio should have increased to 14 percent as GDP grew.

Using the 14 percent ratio, the amount of tax revenues should have stood at Rp 1.17 quadrillion in 2015. That would mean that the state lost Rp 110 trillion in revenues last year. That in itself is a significant amount, not to mention what was missing before 2015.

Meanwhile, the recent revelations in the Panama Papers highlighted another practice that is rampant in Indonesia, namely the creation of special purpose vehicles (SPV) in tax havens to deliberately obscure the amount of wealth that an individual or corporate owns, thus making it difficult for officials to trace them.

The government argues that its data are more sophisticated than the Panama Papers reports and claims there are 6,000 Indonesian citizens and 2,000 SPVs linked to such practices.

That brings us to the second point. When someone commits a mistake, you would want that person to be held accountable, right?

The government should be acting now and hunting down the tax fraudsters if it really has all the data. Why does the government keep on brandishing the tax amnesty instead as the solution to the existing tax issues?

The government has the benefit of using the planned Automatic Exchange of Information (AEoI), which is to be implemented in 2018 by members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

By then, there will be nowhere for evaders to hide. Why, then, is the government so adamant about pardoning the evaders now when it could easily access global data in the coming two years?

Various global agencies, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), doubt the effectiveness of a tax amnesty scheme to boost revenues and improve tax compliance, judging from past amnesty implementations in other countries that have failed to yield the desired results.

It is possible that the government is desperate for cash now, especially because this year’s revenue target is already set at Rp 1.35 quadrillion, almost 30 percent higher than the realization of revenue in 2015.

A host of major infrastructure projects need financing and the tax amnesty may be an easy means to acquire it, but how much funds the government will get is still murky because nobody knows for sure how significant the undeclared assets are.

The shroud surrounding the tax amnesty will only further damage taxpayers’ trust in the tax office. If the tax office with its poor administration cannot even uphold the current system, who can guarantee that it will be able to execute the tax amnesty law?

Past cases of violations by tax officials will resurface and people will be reminded of how the system only benefits the few. The government’s credibility will be at stake and failure to secure revenues will only increase the burden on those taxpayers who already comply.