Course Title: Doctor of Philosophy in Economics

Thesis Title: Indonesian Personal Income Tax Microsimulation: Tax Base Construction, Revenue, Distribution and Compliance Analysis (Case Study of Income Tax Reform 2008)

Supervisors: Professor Alan Duncan and Dr Yogi Vidyattama

Abstract

The Indonesian Government initiated first reforms in 1983 to simplify and replace colonial tax. It was radical move to self-assessment (Heij, 2000). After years of reforms, the actual tax performance is still far from what was initially anticipated.

Indonesian tax reform typically need long discussion between parliament and government. Government mainly based the analysis on macro approach. Somehow microsimulation model is the only tool to answer the detail impact of policy scenarios (Citro and Hanushek, 1991). This is the initial motivation of this thesis, a sound model for personal income tax (PIT).

Three questions will be answered by PIT microsimulation: (1) What is the potential capacity to source revenue from PIT in Indonesia?( 2) How have the changes in income tax legislation in Indonesia, more specifically 2008 reform affected the potential revenue of PIT, the distribution of tax burden, and effectiveness of Indonesian income tax collection? (3) How does one deal with compliance in Indonesian tax policy reform?

PIT basefile improvements by statistical matching of different data will be conducted to overcome the limitations of both survey and administrative data.  Three surveys; Susenas,Sakernas, and IFLS will be combined and imputed with the tax administrative data.

Short Bio:

Bimo Wijayanto is an ALA scholar. He is conducting his PhD research at NATSEM (National Center for Social & Economic Modelling). Bimo received his MBA from the University of Queensland in 2005. He graduated with a BSc in Accounting from University of Gadjah Mada in 2000. Bimo worked in the Directorate General of Taxes, Ministry of Finance in Indonesia since 2003 and was the Head of Macroeconomic Impact Section since 2007. His research focus is on building tax microsimulation in Indonesia. He also has experience as a Lecturer of Auditing, Accounting and Taxation at several Universities in Indonesia