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Tax compliance remains stable despite taxman case
Official figures show that fewer individual taxpayers have submitted their tax returns by the March 31 deadline this year.
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Wearing an orange detainee jacket, Rafael Alun Trisambodo (center), a former official at the Finance Ministry’s Taxation Directorate General, leaves the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) headquarters in South Jakarta on April 3, 2023, after a questioning session. The KPK detained Rafael on charges of accepting bribes from taxpayers for the past 12 years of his career at the Finance Ministry. (Antara/M Risyal Hidayat)
T
ax compliance in Indonesia remains stable as shown in the share of individual taxpayers having submitted their tax returns by the March 31 deadline, despite experts’ concerns about the impact of widespread reporting about the wealth-flexing son of a high-level tax officer.
Individual taxpayer compliance as of the March 31 tax return submission deadline stood at 66.7 percent in 2023, almost unchanged from 66 percent logged by the deadline a year earlier, according to tax news portal DDTC News.
Compliance of nonemployee individuals plummeted to 26.84 percent as of March 31 from 45.53 percent last year, Kontan reported on Sunday.
Bhima Yudhistira, director of Jakarta-based think tank Center of Economics and Law Studies (CELIOS), told The Jakarta Post on Monday that the trend may have been affected by recent cases that resulted in a probe of the high-level tax officer.
“Submission of individuals’ tax returns, especially nonemployee individuals, definitely depends on how much they trust the tax office,” Bhima said.
He added that the government ought to conclude taxman cases to retain taxpayers’ trust, saying that dragging the cases out too long may further hurt compliance, both with regard to the tax return submission deadline and with declaring all taxable income.
“This could affect our tax collection as well,” Bhima said.
