38% Not Yet Willing to Pay Taxes: A Problem of Benefits or of Trust?
The 2026 GoodStats survey found that 62% of respondents are willing to pay taxes, while 38% are not very willing or not willing at all, even though most acknowledge that taxes matter to the country.
51% of citizens feel the benefits of taxes are not felt much or not felt at all; 69% believe the government enjoys the results most, while 85% demand transparency in how taxes are used.
Voluntary compliance remains weak: 82% would be unwilling to pay if taxes were not mandatory. Trust, fairness, concrete benefits, and clear communication are seen as linked to public acceptance.
Most Indonesians accept the obligation to pay taxes. The Survey on Public Perceptions of Taxes and Their Benefits 2026 by GoodStats found that 62% of respondents said they were willing to pay taxes, while 38% said they were not very willing or not willing at all.
The 38% figure is easily read as a sign that the public does not yet understand the importance of taxes. The available data points to a different explanation. Almost all respondents recognize the benefits of taxes at least to some degree; what holds them back is the gap between the money they pay and the benefits they can see, along with their picture of where that money ultimately goes.
Taxes Are Seen as Important, but Not Everyone Accepts Them Willingly
Public acceptance of taxes clusters in the middle. Citing GoodStats (Fitriana, 2026a), 52% of respondents were fairly willing to pay taxes and only 10% were very willing. On the other side, 30% were not very willing and 8% were not willing at all. This online survey involved 1,000 respondents between April 10 and May 20, 2026. Acceptance is dominated by the “fairly” level: enough to fulfill the obligation, but not yet strong support.
At the same time, Indonesians acknowledge the role of taxes for the state. The report Public Trust in Tax 2025: Asia and Beyond, prepared by the OECD together with ACCA, IFAC, and CA ANZ, found that 34% of Indonesian respondents consider taxes essential for sustainable development and 35% consider them important. This online survey across 29 countries offers a picture from a different angle.
The two pictures reveal two levels of judgment. The OECD question concerns taxes as an instrument of development, something collective and distant. The willingness question touches personal experience: money leaving one’s own income. A person can fully agree that the state needs taxes and still feel burdened when weighing what they receive in return. It is this sticking point at the second level that needs to be unpacked.
When the Benefits of Taxes Do Not Feel Close to Everyday Life
The first sticking point lies in perceived benefits. Reporting from GoodStats Data (Rendanianti, 2026a), 51% of respondents judged that the benefits of taxes are not felt much or not felt at all in daily life, comprising 43% who said not felt much and 8% not felt at all. The other 49% do feel the benefits, with 40% saying fairly felt and 9% very felt.
The pattern resembles the willingness data: the most common answer falls in the middle category, “not felt much.” Most of the public acknowledges that the benefits of taxes exist, but judges them not yet close enough.
Asked which sector’s benefits are felt most, 43% of respondents pointed to road and transportation infrastructure. Health (13%) and education (9%) lagged far behind, followed by social assistance (6%) and security and public services (5%). A further 16% said they had not felt any benefit from taxes at all (Rendanianti, 2026b).
The dominance of infrastructure is best read as a matter of visibility. Roads and transportation facilities are physical, used by many people every day, and their construction is plainly visible. Health care, education, and social protection are also funded by the state, but their benefits flow through institutions and programs. A person may know that taxes fund community health centers and public schools without feeling that the services they use come from their own contribution; the distribution of answers above is consistent with this gap between knowing and feeling.
Perceived benefits do not explain the public’s attitude in full, either. From the aggregate figures of the same survey, at least 13% of respondents said they were willing to pay taxes while also judging the benefits to be not felt much or not felt at all, because 62% plus 51% exceeds 100% by 13 points. The willingness of some of the public rests on something else, and one such factor is the image of who enjoys the proceeds of taxes.
Who Is Seen as Enjoying the Proceeds of Taxes the Most?
The second sticking point concerns the direction in which benefits flow. In the same survey, 69% of respondents judged the government to be the party that benefits most from taxes. Only 15% pointed to society as a whole, 3% pointed to the business sector, and 12% answered that they did not know (Leksa, 2026).
In the chain of payer, administrator, and beneficiary, most respondents place the end point at the administrator: money is seen going into the state treasury, while the path by which it returns to citizens is not visible. The 12% who answered “don’t know” reinforce this reading.
This perception meets a firm demand. GoodStats found that 85% of respondents consider transparency in the use of taxes important, including 75% who consider it very important (Leksa, 2026). The public is asking for the path that has so far remained hidden to be opened.
Knowing the Benefits of Taxes Does Not Automatically Create Trust
If the problem were merely a lack of knowledge, publicizing the functions of taxes would be enough. The knowledge data shows a broader problem. 56% of respondents said they know the benefits of taxes for the country (48% fairly knowledgeable and 8% very knowledgeable), 38% know a little, and only 6% do not know at all (Fitriana, 2026b).
Knowledge about the benefits of taxes does not erase the perception that the government is the party that enjoys the results most. 94% of respondents know at least a little about the benefits of taxes, while 69% point to the government as the party that benefits most. These two findings show that knowledge about the functions of taxes and perceptions about who receives the benefits are two different things.
Assessments of the tax system itself give a more direct indicator. Citing GoodStats Data (Shahibah A., 2026), 53% of respondents judged Indonesia’s tax system to be not very good (43%) or not good at all (10%). 44% judged it fairly good, and only 3% judged it very good.
A study by Shelvi and Rachmawati (2025) of 227 urban taxpayers found that trust in government has a positive and significant effect on voluntary tax compliance (path coefficient 0.575; p<0.01). Respondents were more inclined to comply when they judged that tax revenue was used fairly and transparently.
The OECD survey and its partners (2025) give a similar signal from another angle. When Indonesian respondents were asked to choose reasons that could justify tax evasion, the most frequently chosen reason was that taxes are not spent well (36%), ahead of taxes being too high (31%) and the tax system being unfair (27%). The same report found that 81% of Indonesian respondents cited corruption as a major factor in their attitudes toward taxes. The integrity of management helps shape how the public weighs taxes.
Knowledge answers what taxes are collected for, whereas trust answers whether the money reaches its destination and whether those who manage it can be relied upon. The public’s sticking point also lies in the second question.
Why Does Voluntary Willingness Differ from Compliance?
The third sticking point is most visible in a scenario without obligation. Asked whether they would still pay taxes if taxes were not mandatory, 82% of GoodStats respondents answered unwilling or very unwilling, while 12% would still be willing (Leksa, 2026).
This figure becomes meaningful only when read together with the willingness figure. With 62% of respondents willing and 82% unwilling to pay without obligation, at least 44% of respondents said they are willing and yet would not pay if the obligation were removed. Willingness to pay taxes, in other words, can coexist with dependence on formal obligation. For some respondents, saying they are willing does not necessarily mean they would pay taxes if the obligation were abolished.
The tax literature calls this internal drive tax morale: the intrinsic motivation to fulfill tax obligations. GoodStats’ hypothetical question measures something close to this concept, namely how far public compliance rests on formal obligation, and the answer is: very far.
Research in Indonesia shows that intrinsic motivation and assessments of institutions work side by side. Among 211 non-employee individual taxpayers in Jabodetabek, Fitriandi et al. (2026) found that perceived fairness, trust in government, and tax morale each had a positive and significant direct effect on voluntary compliance, operating as parallel pathways. Timothy and Abbas (2021) found tax morale to be the factor most strongly associated with compliance among 232 SMEs, while A’lam and Nustini (2025) found that tax fairness, tax literacy, and life satisfaction significantly affect the tax morale of 200 taxpayers. Fairness emerged as a significant factor in all three studies.
The OECD data and its partners (2025) show another side of willingness. When additional taxes were linked to a clearly stated purpose, namely supporting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 25% of Indonesian respondents were willing to pay a significant additional amount and 46% a small amount, while 28% were unwilling. Compared with the GoodStats scenario, this contrast offers a clue: willingness to contribute emerges more readily when the purpose is concrete. The OECD report itself notes that the more strongly respondents see a link between taxes and sustainable development, the higher their willingness to pay additional taxes.
Indonesia’s Tax Transparency Is the Best in the World, So Why Is Public Trust Still a Challenge?
Amid these trust problems, Indonesia holds an achievement that offers a different perspective. In version 2.1 of the Global Tax Expenditures Transparency Index (GTETI), updated on May 11, 2026, Indonesia ranked first out of 116 assessed jurisdictions with a score of 79.9, ahead of South Korea (78.3) and Germany (72.2) (Redonda et al., 2026). The index, compiled by the Council on Economic Policies (CEP) and the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), assesses the regularity, quality, and coverage of tax expenditure reports, that is, the tax incentives granted by the government, across five dimensions: public availability, institutional framework, methodology and coverage, descriptive data, and evaluation of tax expenditures.
This achievement shows a dimension different from the survey findings. Indonesia’s tax expenditure reports are open and well structured, but openness at the document level does not by itself translate into benefits that citizens recognize or into trust in how taxes are managed. Technical transparency is a foundation of accountability, while public acceptance also depends on perceived benefits and trust in institutions.
It should also be noted that the GTETI measures the transparency of tax expenditure reporting, that is, openness of information about the tax incentives granted by the government. Indonesia’s ranking therefore does not automatically reflect the overall quality of governance, economic conditions, or the success of all tax policies. The achievement shows strength in the aspect of reporting transparency that the index assesses; it is not a comprehensive evaluation of the government’s performance in managing taxes.
From Transparency to Trust: What Needs to Change?
Read together, this data portrays tax acceptance as a staircase with four steps. The first step, knowledge of the benefits of taxes, has begun to be climbed: 56% of respondents are fairly or very knowledgeable about the benefits of taxes, and another 38% know a little. The next three steps are more fragile: perceived benefits remain thin and concentrated in infrastructure, the flow of benefits is imagined to stop at the government, and trust in management is a condition for voluntary compliance.
The most plausible explanation for acceptance stalling at the “fairly” level lies in these last three steps. The implication for public communication is quite clear: campaigns that explain the functions of taxes are still needed, but they are not enough without evidence that links payment to outcomes.
First, clarify where taxes are allocated, at a scale an individual can read. State budget (APBN) figures in the trillions of rupiah are hard to connect to a deduction from a person’s income; an allocation breakdown attached to payment receipts or tax filings would bridge that gap while also answering the demand of the 85% of respondents for transparency. Clarity of language also matters: the OECD survey and its partners (2025) found that respondents who strongly agree that tax authority communication is easy to understand are about four times more likely to trust that authority than those who strongly disagree.
Second, show results the public can recognize. Non-physical services need to be made as visible as infrastructure: signs indicating that services at community health centers, public schools, or assistance programs are funded by taxes, accompanied by outcomes expressed in units familiar to citizens.
These two steps converge with the findings of Shelvi and Rachmawati (2025): fairness, transparency, and credible leadership build trust, and all three are tested through things the public can see.
Obligation gets taxes paid. Acceptance that goes beyond “fairly willing” grows when citizens can find their contributions again in a form they recognize.
References
A’lam, N. S., & Nustini, Y. (2025). What shapes tax morality? A study of Indonesian taxpayers factors. Global Journal of Economic and Finance Research, 2(9), 925–931. https://doi.org/10.55677/GJEFR/19-2025-Vol02E9
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