Click here – too slow. Press this button – I can't press it.
Father: If you fail, start again from the beginning
Mother: This is indeed made to be difficult
Poki: What game you playing? Looks difficult.
Father: Filling out Coretax
Indonesia's online tax reporting system Coretax – which was launched back in January 2025 – remains so complex and glitchy that even Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa admits he could not complete his own annual tax return without assistance.
Speaking to reporters on March 25, Sedewa said he required assistance from tax officials just to access the system, yet still faced repeated disruptions during the login and submission process.
"To be honest, I didn't fill it in myself. I was helped by tax officials. I logged in, then it kept looping. It took four attempts just to get in", he told the Jakarta Globe. "Sometimes the system just keeps spinning without giving any indication of what's happening".
Sedewa explained that these glitches often lead users to assume the system has crashed, prompting them to restart the process and re-enter data from scratch, a problem that should have been identified during pre-launch testing.
"So we think it's frozen and input everything again. That should have been tested earlier. I don't know why it wasn't. We will fix it", he said.
Beyond technical errors, he pointed to deeper structural flaws such as the system's user interface and language, which he said remain difficult for the general public to understand.
In response to the problems, the Finance Ministry pushed back the deadline for individual taxpayers to submit their annual tax returns to the end of April, citing ongoing issues with the Coretax system. The extension grants an additional month from the usual March cutoff, aligning the filing deadline for individuals with that of corporate taxpayers.
[Abridged from a Jakarta Globe article titled "Indonesia's Coretax proves too complex, even for its Finance Minister".]
