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Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati gives her remarks at the customs office, in East Jakarta, on Sept. 30, 2016. (Courtesy of Directorate General of Customs and Excise/File)
F
auziah Hegarty had to deal with an unexpected customs check at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in South Tangerang, Banten, upon arriving from Dublin one night in July.
Three officials from the Finance Ministry’s Customs and Excise Directorate- General inspected her luggage, which contained three handbags of the brands Gucci, Chanel and Prada that she had used during her one-month visit to the city with her family.
“The officials said they had to check the bags, because they were branded ones and subject to [import and luxury] taxes,” Fauziah, a housewife living in Ragunan, South Jakarta, said on Monday.
“I told them that I had brought the bags from Jakarta and had not bought them [in Ireland]. They kept checking the bags and realized that they weren’t new and agreed to release them.”
The officials, she went on, explained to her they were enforcing a 2010 regulation stipulating that goods worth more than US$250 per person or $1,000 per family of four traveling together bought abroad were subject to taxes, even if they were for personal use.
Confronted with cashstrapped state coffers, the government is in an all-out effort to increase state revenue, and Fauziah’s experience fits in with viral video footage of many travelers being quizzed recently at airports on imported luxury goods.
One such video shows a woman arriving from Singapore having to pay Rp 27 million ($3,600) in taxes for buying a luxury handbag there worth S$7,000 ($5,200). Although the woman refused to pay, her husband caved in to avoid more trouble, as the couple had no tax registration number (NPWP).
