Indonesians who hide assets abroad face punishment
The Directorate General of Taxation will seriously investigate Indonesian assets that are not reported through the annual tax return form (SPT), and is preparing punishment for non-compliant taxpayers, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said over the weekend.
She said the first step would be for the Directorate General of Taxation to check the status of any Indonesian wealth parked overseas. “Currently, we are in the process of studying the data,” the minister said as reported by kontan.co.id.
She was referring to data indicating that Indonesians have parked Rp 1.3 quadrillion (US$91.3 billion) worth of assets in a number of countries, data obtained because of cooperation among countries through the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) in 2018. Through the cooperation, the tax office has received reports from 66 countries.
Sri Mulyani said the Directorate General of Taxation was also crosschecking the data submitted by taxpayers in the SPT, the tax amnesty data, data from the banks that were sent to the tax office and the data obtained through AEOI cooperation.
Sri Mulyani, however, would not say when the investigation would be completed, but she said the tax office would use the AEOI data in an optimal way.
Tax research and training services analyst Bawono Kristiaji said he believed the tax office could use the AEOI data to force taxpayers to comply with the regulation. “The [AEOI] data could be used to monitor the compliance of the taxpayers,” Bawono added.
He said one of the reasons for the low tax ratio in the country was that the government had no data about Indonesian taxpayers’ assets abroad. (bbn)
