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Meet the man who brings big data to Indonesia’s tax office
Tax office director for digital transformation Iwan Djuniardi talked to The Jakarta Post about the tax office's technological transformation that aims at improving the country's tax collection.
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Tax office director for digital transformation Iwan Djuniardi. (JP/Norman Harsono)
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wo years ago, a district tax office (KPP) in Surabaya, East Java, would need four days just to retrieve a taxpayer’s data from servers at the Jakarta headquarters because it had to wait for the information to be manually extracted, processed, then flown-in on compact discs.
“The headquarters couldn’t email most of the data either. It was unsafe. And much of the data's file sizes were huge so it couldn’t be sent via email,” said tax office director for digital transformation Iwan Djuniardi during an interview with The Jakarta Post at his workplace in Jakarta.
The headquarters was, in fact, forbidden from sending tax data through any public file sharing vendor due to the 1983 Tax Law Article 34 that stipulates tax office staff cannot share such data with "outsiders", whom directors interpret to include vendors.
Thus, when Iwan took office in 2015, he decided the tax office needed to build its own big data system that would automatically compile, analyze and report data for tax officers nationwide.
He said the system, dubbed Social Network Analytics (Soneta), was rolled out nationwide last year and reduced the KPPs’ waiting time to a matter of seconds.
Iwan’s ultimate goal is to raise Indonesia’s tax-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio, which has been steadily declining from 14.3 percent in 2013 to 10.7 percent in 2017 before rebounding to 11.5 percent last year, based on Finance Ministry data.
Indonesia’s tax ratio in 2017 was also the lowest among Southeast Asian peers Malaysia (13.1 percent), the Philippines (14.2 percent), Singapore (14.2 percent), Thailand (14.8 percent) and Vietnam (19.1 percent), according to World Bank data.
