Jakarta — Indonesia's ambitious plan to overhaul its tax collection system is stumbling just weeks before a mandatory nationwide rollout, exposing the gap between Southeast Asia's digital governance ambitions and its capacity to execute at scale.
The Coretax system, designed to replace the country's aging tax infrastructure with a modern, integrated platform, has been plagued by technical glitches that leave users staring at loading screens for minutes on end. Videos circulating on Indonesian social media show the system attempting to load dropdown menus listing the country's over 80,000 villages (kelurahan)—a task that should take milliseconds but instead freezes browsers and triggers timeouts.
"It's like watching a system choke on its own data," said Budi Santoso, a tax consultant in Jakarta who has been testing the platform. "How can we trust this to handle the entire nation's tax filings?"
The Indonesian government has staked significant political capital on the digitalization of tax administration, viewing it as essential to expanding the tax base and funding an ambitious $195 billion national budget for 2026. Tax revenue accounts for roughly 85% of government income, making the smooth functioning of Coretax critical to everything from infrastructure spending to social programs.
But the system's problems reflect a broader pattern across Southeast Asia, where governments have rushed to implement digital governance platforms without adequate infrastructure, testing, or user training. Thailand faced similar issues with its e-filing system in 2023, which crashed during peak filing season. Malaysia's MyTax system experienced persistent outages in its first year. The Philippines postponed its own tax digitalization rollout twice due to technical concerns.
"ASEAN governments see digitalization as a silver bullet," said Dr. Siti Rahman, a public administration expert at the University of Indonesia.
