Best tax officials wont's ensure LTO corruption-free

Best tax officials wont's ensure LTO corruption-free

Rendi A. Witular, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The Directorate General of Tax promised to place its best
officials at the Large Taxpayers Office (LTO) but dared not to
guarantee that the new office would soon become a model of clean
and credible tax office as expected by many people.

"We can't guarantee that the people we are now recruiting are
not corrupt.

"But the point is that our supervision system will surely
guarantee that there won't be any irregularities occur at the
LTO," Robert Pakhpahan, secretary of the Ministry of Finance's
LTO task force, said Friday.

He said the LTO would have a internal supervory system which
will effectively identify corrupt officials; and from outside,
the LTO will be supervised by a code of conduct committee
comprising of senior officials from the Ministry of Finance and
the directorate general of tax.

The directorate is now in the process of recruiting all
officials to be stationed at the LTO, which is expected to start
operation on July 1, according to Robert.

The LTO, which will be assigned for a special job of
collecting tax from the country's 200 largest taxpayers, will
have 410 workers, including 60 of the number were stationed as
account representatives.

Robert said the directorate has finished the recruitment of
ordinary staff and account representatives for the new tax
office, while the screening process for LTO's candidate leaders,
which is now in progress, would be completed by the end of this
month.

"The head of the LTO will be chosen by the director general
himself with the approval from the minister of finance. The name
will be announced two weeks from now," said Robert.

There is no competition for the LTO jobs as the candidate
staffs are recruited based on the appointment by their superiors
at the tax directorate. Candidates have to undergo several
psychology tests and interviews conducted by the human resource
department at the ministry of finance.

Concerning prerequisite, Robert only said a candidate must
have a good track record, meaning he or she had never done
mistakes in doing his or her job at the tax directorate.
Experience and length of service are not part of the
prerequisite.

Petronius Saragih, the head of the LTO task force, earlier
said the LTO workers will receive higher salaries than any
ordinary tax official, -- a policy which aims to dissuade them
from committing corruption. However, he refused to specify the
figures.

The government has long provided higher salaries for tax
officials than other governmental officials, which is to
encourage not to take illegal earnings.

Officials at the directorate said fresh graduate official get
a take home pay of Rp 1,3 million per month, while the head of a
regional tax office, who is ranked as the second echelon
official, get at least Rp 10 million per month.

In comparison, a fresh graduate of the ministry of fishery and
maritime affairs only receives Rp 700,000 per month, while a
second-echelon director receives Rp 7 million.

Lured by the high salary offers, many tax officials are
reportedly eager to join the LTO but they were disappointed by
the selection process which they called "unfair" and "lacking
transparency".

They also warned that the ordinary tax officials would envy
the LTO officials given their high salary and this would hurt the
working environment in the directorate.

"Many tax officials now feel unhappy that the high salary of
the LTO officials will only create a wide gap among tax officials
and sense of unfairness," said a tax official who wanted to
remain anonymous.