Sat, 22 Sep 2001

City asks luxury car owners to pay tax

JAKARTA (JP): Many owners of luxury cars here do not pay vehicle tax, an official said on Friday.

City Revenue Agency head Deden Supriadi said that there were at least 4,000 luxury cars, worth over Rp 400 million (US$44,444) each. But only a few of their owners had paid the vehicle tax this year.

"To date, only one owner of a luxury car worth more than Rp 2 billion has paid the vehicle tax," he told reporters at City Hall.

He said there was more than one car in the city that cost over Rp 2 billion.

The tax on a Ferrari sedan, which is priced at Rp 3.3 billion, is about Rp 25 million per year.

"We don't have data on the number of Ferraris here, but we believe it's more than one," he said.

Deden suspected that the owners of most of those cars used fake documents to avoid their obligation to pay tax.

The city administration plans to obtain Rp 750 billion in vehicle tax this year.

From January until last month the agency had collected Rp 563 billion, Deden said, adding that he was optimistic that it could reach its revenue target for vehicle tax.

There are 1.9 million registered vehicles in the city, including about 900,000 motorcycles and 350,000 sedans.

Vehicle tax is set at 1.5 percent of the vehicle's price; the latter are set out in a gubernatorial decree every year.(jun)