Topics & Events

Participants of TCTP

In tax administration, it is important to raise awareness of taxpayers whereby taxpayers more voluntarily pay tax. As part of this initiative, Malaysia has been operating tax call centres.

The Third Country Training Programme (TCTP) on Tax Administration (Revenue Management) held in November for tax officers of neighboring countries introduced an observation to the call centre for the first time, which attracted great interest from the participants.

In Japan, National Tax Agency (NTA) started the operation of call centre for tax payment from 2002. Meanwhile, Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia (IRBM), referring to the practice by NTA, opened call centres for tax payment from 2004. At present Malaysia's call centers provide various ways of services: apart from receiving inquiries from taxpayers over phone, IRBM calls taxpayers for reminding payment of tax, it also started chat service online, exchanging text messages over the internet. Introduction of call centre takes great effect in reducing tax delinquencies in Malaysia.

The idea of call centre in Malaysia has started spreading to other countries. In many developing countries, despite tax agencies' endeavor to improve services to taxpayers, it seems difficult to operate call centres as Malaysia does, according to the participants of this TCTP. Therefore, call centre has become one of great examples that the participants wanted to adopt.

However, introduction of facility and technology of call centre to the participants' countries may not be sufficient. Human resource development to support the system is also important in participants' countries. A Japanese expert advised to the participants in the training. In fact, IRBM strived for improving expertise of tax officers through wide range of exchanges such as visits, international conferences, trainings and Technical Cooperation Projects etc.

In this TCTP, while IRBM implements this training and share Malaysia's experiences, NTA helps strengthen the training with two Japanese experts who delivered a series of lectures. Based on the trust build through a training on tax administration, it is expected that the network among tax authorities is maintained, and ideas of call centre are spreading.

Training Profile
Course title	Third Country Training Programme (TCTP) Tax Administration (Revenue Management)
Venue	Kuala Lumpur
Training institute	MTA (Malaysian Tax Academy)
Partner	Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Malaysia
Training period	From 3 to 16 November 2019 (14 days)
Participants	13 participants from 3 countries (Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam)