But there are triumphs despite the challenges. Take Indonesia. Policy loans from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) are helping Southeast Asia’s largest economy rejuvenate a tired and abused tax collection system into one that generated 40 per cent more revenue in 2008 than it did before a new system was implemented.
Tax revenue is now 20 per cent of GDP. The old system, remembers Jörn Brömmelhörster, Senior Country Economist, Indonesia Resident Mission at the Asian Development Bank, was characterised by pervasive corruption, collusion and nepotism. It wasn’t close to being transparent. Accounting was unreliable, enforcement was poor, and the mandates of auditing bodies was often unclear.
The new system’s crowning achievement is, says Brömmelhörster, the introduction of the Treasury Single Account, which manages public finances on a single, centralised platform – there used to be some 18,000 separate commercial bank accounts to deal with. Reform is still underway, and there plans to implement a modernisation strategy to re-engineer the tax department completely.
Even a revenue collection system that has got 24 per cent more effective since 2004 still has holes to fill. So what about elsewhere in the region? Robin Hicks asked government officials in China, South Korea, Australia and Hong Kong: are you happy with the efficiency of your tax collection system?
“Yes” - David Butler, Second Commissioner, Technology and Operations, Taxation Office, Australia We recorded a A$20.9 billion increase in revenue collections in 2007/8 over the previous year, which is the highest ever annual increase. This positive outcomes took place in a difficult year, given the need to implement a range of new legislative measures following the transition to a new government, higher workloads and budget constraints including an increased efficiency dividend. We handled two million registrations, over 12 million telephone calls, over three million items of correspondence, 14.5 million tax returns, and 18 million activity statements. The tenth anniversary of e-tax saw more than 1.9 million self preparers lodge their 2007 return electronically, exceeding paper returns for the second year running. While our service standard index was lower last year, partly as a result of major system changes, we were still able to maintain the positive trend in our surveys of tax agent, business and community perceptions.
“Maybe” - Vincent Chiu, Chief Assessor, Inland Revenue Department, Hong Kong The revenue collected by the IRD during 2007/8 was close to 65.5 per cent of the Government General Revenue, an increase of US$5.8 million - 29.4 per cent - on the previous year. With material productivity savings and an increase in revenue collections during the year, the cost of collection of revenue decreased from 0.69 per cent to 0.58 per cent. We make extensive use of IT to boost efficiency and provide comprehensive e-services to help taxpayers. A one-stop eTAX portal was launched in January 2008 to provide personalised e-services for taxpayers, enabling them to e-pay tax and receive e-alert messages on return filing and when the time limits for discharging these obligations and approaching. The take up rate of eTAX services is rising. Now, over 280,00 taxpayers have opened eTAX accounts, and over 10 per cent of taxpayers e-filed. We will further expand our e-services and further promote e-filing. We will also continue to employ new information technology to improve our operations and efficiency.
“No” - Sun Yalin, Deputy Director of Tax Services, Local Taxation Bureau, Dalian, China From a historical perspective, we have achieved much progress. But there is a lot of work to do to improve the efficiency of our services, get more citizens using them online, and integrate internal and external government networks. At the moment, many agencies in and outside of our e-government framework are virtually isolated, which creates the need for large amounts of information to be replicated. This seriously lowers efficiency, raises costs and impacts the effectiveness of the tax collection system. Not only that, but technical issues have meant that tax forms cannot be managed and shared on a central e-government platform. We need to build a unified information network that connects internal and external network resources so that information can be shared and tax collection made more efficient.
“Yes” - Lim Soo Kyung, Assistant Commissioner for IT, National Tax Service, South Korea IT is playing an important role in improving the performance of our tax service. We installed the Tax Integrated System in 1997, which allows all NTS staff to access all tax resource information online from wherever they work. So we can manage all tax resource information in real time. We also set up the Hometax system in 2002, and now most taxpayers pay taxes and handle tax work online without having to visit the tax office. These aside, 26 systems are up and running, including a data warehouse system for efficiently using massive amounts of tax data and the world’s first Cash Receipt System for tracing cash transactions. We are now working on implementing the e-Tax Invoice project and using RFID technology to track the distribution of hard liquor. We hope that these new services will improve efficiency and secure more tax revenue. We want to get better by integrating existing systems into a single, low-cost, high-efficiency system.
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Robin Hicks
Quelle/Source: FutureGov Magazin, 02.11.2009
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
