IN the classic masterpiece The Art of War, Sun Tzu states that winning a war without needing to deploy troops to the battlefield is the pinnacle of supreme skill.
If this principle is transformed into the realm of modern tax administration, true success against tax non-compliance is achieved when the tax authority is able to design a system in which the market ecosystem can naturally monitor one another and promote compliance independently.
The need for this radical and efficient supervision strategy has become increasingly urgent amid Indonesia's consistently stagnant tax ratio performance over the past 5 years. Based on official data from the Ministry of Finance (MoF) published by DDTCNews, Indonesia's tax ratio in 2025 has even slipped to 9.31% of the gross domestic product (GDP), down from the previous year's level of 10.08%.
This figure places Indonesia well below the average tax ratio of Asia-Pacific countries, which stands at around 19%, and that of OECD member countries, which reaches an average of 33.5%.
This situation is compounded by the massive scale of shadow economy activity. A report by the Indonesian Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (Pusat Pelaporan dan Analisis Transaksi Keuangan/PPATK in Indonesian) estimates the shadow economy's contribution in Indonesia at between 8.3% and 10% of GDP, equivalent to IDR1,958 trillion. Several international financial institutions even project a far larger figure, reaching as high as 30% to 40% of GDP.
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