Naughty Tax Civil Servants Tampering with Coretax, Purbaya Hunts for the Culprits!

Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia - Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa is conducting an internal investigation regarding the parties who designed the Coretax system’s interface in a way that does not facilitate taxpayers.

Purbaya stated that the user-unfriendly design was deliberately created by its designers.

“This Coretax design is a bit odd. It should have been made with a direct interface for customers and the public from the start to make it easy. Apparently, it was made complicated so that in the middle there is a separate interface application. This is being sold to large companies. I just found out,” Purbaya said at the State Palace in Jakarta on Friday (27/3/2026).

Purbaya promised to resolve the Coretax system’s interface issues to make it even easier for taxpayers to use. However, he said improvements could only be made next year because this year is focused on processing the 2025 Annual Tax Return (SPT) notifications.

“I will sort it out internally. But it can’t be done now because it’s already running. Next year, we will fix it. We will secure all the Coretax systems first, addressing the obstacles, then I will clean up that interface space that was deliberately created,” Purbaya emphasised.

Purbaya noted that the Coretax system is still slow to access for taxpayers, especially approaching the deadline for individual taxpayers’ SPT reporting, which falls on 31 March 2026.

Therefore, he said the reporting period will be given a relaxation with a waiver of administrative sanctions for one more month. Moreover, only around 9 million taxpayers have reported their SPT so far, out of a total target of about 15 million taxpayers.

“So there’s still quite a long way to go, so we extend it by one month. Because suddenly there are reports that the Coretax is just spinning around. Even though it had disappeared before,” Purbaya explained.

Purbaya said this problem is also caused by internal actions at the Directorate General of Taxes, which he suspects are tampering with the Coretax system with vendor parties.

“Apparently, there are naughty ones in our midst. There’s one who contracted with a vendor that we had already stopped because of slow service, and it was sneaked back in. So now they won’t admit who sneaked it back in. Later, I will check again who sneaked that vendor back in, and we will take action,” Purbaya stated.