Jakarta. Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa on Wednesday voiced suspicions that the vendor behind Indonesia’s Coretax tax administration system may have deliberately made the platform overly complex, following persistent complaints from users about access difficulties.

Despite being in operation for more than a year, Coretax continues to face issues, including slow access and occasional outages that prevent taxpayers from using the system.

Purbaya said a third-party software provider has been offering faster connections to Coretax exclusively for large clients, raising concerns that the system may have been intentionally complicated to benefit the vendor.

“One of the weaknesses of this system is that there are software services that connect Coretax with users, and they claim it works faster if you use their software. So I suspect Coretax has been deliberately made convoluted,” Purbaya told reporters in Jakarta.

He said he had only become aware of the issue over the past month. The Directorate General of Taxation is now working to resolve technical problems and improve interactions between taxpayers and tax officials within the system, including evaluating the vendor’s performance.

Purbaya warned that the government could terminate its partnership with parties deemed slow and uncooperative in fixing the system.

“We will ensure that Coretax no longer uses services from companies that are slow. As for the Coretax software itself, it will continue to be improved by a dedicated team,” he said.

He also criticized the system’s language, saying it is overly rigid and technical, making it difficult for ordinary users to understand. He added that he still requires assistance from tax officers when filing his own annual tax return due to frequent system disruptions.

“Sometimes the system takes too long without notifying us, so it appears to hang and we have to re-enter the data. We are currently fixing this,” he said.

Despite ongoing technical challenges, taxpayer compliance remains relatively strong. As of March 24, a total of 8.87 million tax filings had been submitted through Coretax.

To date, around 16.7 million taxpayers have activated their Coretax accounts, including 15.67 million individual taxpayers, 955,000 corporate taxpayers, and 90,411 government institutions.

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