JAKARTA: Indonesia’s tax agency says documents submitted by Alphabet Inc.’s Google as part of a probe into its operations are not adequate and has demanded to meet with top executives from the technology firm.
A meeting on Thursday with the tax office was abruptly halted after senior executives from Google failed to show and the company sent only a local representative, Hestu Yoga Saksama, a spokesman for the Directorate General of Taxation, said in an interview with Bloomberg News on Friday. Google had submitted some financial statements but they didn’t match the tax agency’s own assessment of the revenue the company was making in Indonesia, he said.
Financial statements prepared by Google, obtained by Bloomberg, show the search giant posted 20.9 billion rupiah ($1.6 million) in pretax profit in Indonesia and paid 5.2 billion rupiah in taxes in 2015, substantially lower than the 5 trillion rupiah the tax agency says it’s owed including fines from that year. The long-running dispute between the Indonesian government and Google has escalated in recent months to include threats of criminal action.
“Because what we have, our auditors’ results show that they have greater revenue,” Saksama said. “We hope that Google will cooperate with us so that we have a settlement based on true and proper documents so that we don’t have to make it a higher level of assessment, like taking it to court.”
