Jakarta. Achilles Advanced System, the company behind web-based tax reporting application OnlinePajak, aims to attract 100,000 corporate tax payers over the next two years in a move that could help improve tax compliance in Indonesia.

Since its launch in September 2014, OnlinePajak has aided some 6,000 taxpayers in calculating, paying and reporting their taxes through the secured system.

Still, the number is a small portion of the five million taxable companies in Indonesia, only 550,000 of which regularly pay their taxes.

“In two years, we target to have 100,000 taxpayers in our system,” Achilles president director Charles Guinot said in an interview last week.

“Then we will go for the 500,000 [mark] and the 5 million.”

OnlinePajak targets small and medium enterprises that usually do not have enough time or resources to deal with the long administrative process of paying taxes, including the value added tax and corporate income tax.

“The companies are really the ones who are heavily burdened in tax compliance,” Charles said.

Indonesian companies spend 259 hours a year in average to prepare, pay and file their taxes, compared to the Asia Pacific average of 231 hours, according to a 2014 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Guinot said that OnlinePajak could cut the time SMEs spend to complete their tax obligations by a half — from 20 hours a month to 10 hours a month.

OnlinePajak is one of several companies providing web-based tax services that are integrated with the Indonesian tax office’s online system.

Officials have encouraged tax payers to shift to the online program  as part of its effort to improve compliance and meet its ambitious target of collecting $94 billion in tax revenue this year.

Achilles’ Guinot said his company ultimately aims “to help the government collect taxes.”

The France-based firm is committed to keeping OnlinePajak free for its usersAchilles will instead offer software solutions to clients in other areas that link to the tax payment system, such as accounting and employee and payroll management.

“We don’t want tax payers to pay for paying their taxes,” Guinot said.

GlobeAsia

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Source: The Jakarta Globe