Tax compliance

In Indonesia, personal taxpayers have from 1 January to 31 March to file an annual tax return. However, tax return submissions are not distributed evenly over this period.

According to the principle of simplification, we are more likely to act on a message if it is easy to understand. Providing simplified guidance on filing an annual tax return and helping individuals to plan their submissions could increase early filing rates.

We also tapped into feelings of national pride to see whether we could encourage early tax return filing.

We worked with the Indonesian tax authority, the Direktorat Jenderal Pajak (DJP), to test whether the application of behavioural insights could improve the impact of tax returns through the development of new email reminders.

We ran our largest ever randomised controlled trial. The planning email was the best performing, increasing early filing by 7 per cent and overall filing by 2 per cent. The DJP scaled this email in 2019.