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Indonesia, Singapore step up anti-tax evasion cooperation

Indonesia and Singapore will amend legal regulations to intensify tax-information exchange with a view to detecting tax evasion.
Indonesia and Singapore will amend legal regulations to intensifytax-information exchange with a view to detecting tax evasion.

The move was clarified in an agreement freshly signed by IndonesianFinance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro and his Singaporean counterpartTharman Shanmugaratnam.

The agreement, upgraded from the onesigned in 1992, will take effect by 2017 or 2018 at the latest. It willallow the revelation of information about individual assets, in case ofneed.

It aims to increase the efficiency of the fight againsttrans-national tax evasion and the avoidance of double taxation betweenthe two countries.

According to Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro,Indonesia’s key weakness in the tax system is taxing individual incomeand assets, especially the wealthy who have assets in Singapore.

Indonesia’s new President, Joko Widodo, who succeeded in increasingtax revenue when he was the Mayor of Solo, Central Java and Governor ofJakarta, has set a target of rising the country’s tax-to-GDP ratio to 16percent from the current 12 percent.

It looks to equalise thefigure with other regional countries such as Singapore (14.5 percent),Malaysia (16.1 percent), and Thailand (16.5 percent).

Indonesia is targeting a tax revenue of about 107.1 billion USD in 2015.-VNA
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