The biggest taxpayers
There are not many surprising entries to the list of Indonesia's 200 biggest individual and corporate taxpayers for 1995, as announced by Tax Director General Fuad Bawazier Sunday. Most of them, especially those in the top 100 taxpayers for both categories, are familiar at least to the general public who periodically peruse the business pages of newspapers. Many of the names in the top individual taxpayer list are related to those included in the corporate taxpayer list. The individuals are either the owners or directors of the biggest corporate taxpayers.
We know both the top individual and corporate taxpayers are the largest in their respective categories but it is obviously impossible to know how much tax they have paid because that is a secret protected by law. Such details are known only to the tax officers. But a rough indicator of the amount of taxes they paid can be seen from the three tax brackets set by the income tax law: 10 percent for an annual income of up to Rp 10 million (US$4,230), 15 percent for an annual income of more than Rp 10 million up to Rp 50 million and 30 percent for an annual income exceeding Rp 50 million.
The rankings of the top taxpayers for both categories naturally fluctuate with the annual incomes earned. We should not be easily misled to the wrong conclusions, let alone suspicions of tax evasion or underpayment, whenever a taxpayer was sharply downgraded in the list in a particular year. But income is not a fixed variable for top-income earners. The income of companies' owners or shareholders does not fluctuate according to the profits of their businesses but mainly due to the dividends paid out of their corporate profits. A company, for example, can rank very high in the list of corporate taxpayers but its owners may not be included in the top individual taxpayer list because the shareholders decide to reinvest the bulk of the earnings.
But there are several outstanding trends worth noting in the annual lists of top taxpayers. One of them is the persistent top rankings gained by the two largest clove-cigarette makers-- PT Gudang Garam and PT HM Sampoerna since 1991. This indicates both high profit margins and steady increases gained by the cigarette companies. No wonder the owners of the cigarette companies have steadily topped the list of the biggest individual taxpayers. For 1995, five of the seven owners of Gudang Garam ranked from the third to the seventh and two others ranked 22nd and 31st respectively. The Sampoerna family has also persistently occupied the top ranks. The Soedono Salim family who owns hundreds of companies put only three of its members on the list -- in the 1st, 8th and 26th ranks respectively.
Another outstanding trend is the steady top ranking of the two state-owned telecommunications companies-- Telkom and Satelindo. Also highly noticeable is the increasing number of publicly- listed companies in the list.
One may criticize the fact that the 200 biggest individual taxpayers accounted for a mere 2.7 percent of the total individual income tax receipts. Tax Director General Fuad Bawazier admitted that his office received only 1.2 million individual income tax returns in 1995, while the number of registered individual taxpayers totaled more than 10 million. This indicates the crucial role played by company employees who do not file individual tax returns because their income tax is directly withheld by their employers (companies) and is filed together in the corporate tax returns.
Despite the extreme lack of details disclosed by the top taxpayer lists, the annual rankings should be welcomed as part of an educational process for the people to fulfill one of their civic duties -- paying taxes. The government and analysts have often conceded that the potential tax capacity in the country has remained largely untapped and the ratio of income tax receipts against the gross domestic product is the lowest among ASEAN countries. We still have a long way to go in instilling a high sense of tax compliance. But such an awareness could be enhanced if taxpayers knew that their money was being spent for the public's benefits and not wasted through inefficiency, corruption and other forms of malfeasance.