In a bid to open wide the tax information access, Indonesia planned to renegotiate the articles set in the tax information sharing agreement with countries joined in Study Group on Asian Tax Administration and Research (SGATAR), the Bisnis Indonesia newspaper reported here on Wednesday.
Indonesia's Tax Office Head Mohammad Tjiptardjo said that the renegotiation is intended to scraping the bank's secrecy code that hinders the tax office to obtain information on taxpayers.
"There will be no bank secrecy anymore. The bank is expected to promptly provide data on the taxpayers living in certain countries and their
financial links in banks operating in Indonesia," Mohammad said.
SGATAR is a tax association joined by 15 Asia-Pacific countries consisting among others Indonesia, Australia, China, Japan, South Korea,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
Indonesia's renegotiation initiative was conceived from the recent 39th meeting of SCATAR countries in Bali when the member countries agreed on the need to apply bilateral tax information exchange to watch taxpayers in certain country who have property, or business in other countries.
The bilateral tax information exchange is expected to make the taxpayers abide by the tax regulation and prevent tax aversion, Muhammad said.
Besides that, the Indonesian head of tax office also said that the bilateral tax information exchange would also provide legal certainty for the taxpayers.