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Not only do the country’s public-sector companies not owe $2 billion in back taxes, as was claimed last week, they have actually overpaid by at least $1 billion and perhaps as much as $1.6 billion, the State Ministry for State Enterprises said.

“After we checked the accounts of our companies, we found that taxes had apparently been overpaid to the tune of Rp 15.22 trillion, mostly involving [PT] Pertamina’s taxes,” said Muhammad Said Didu, the ministry’s secretary. “That’s based on audits conducted by the Supreme Audit Agency [BPK] of the companies’ accounts between 2003 and 2008.”

However, of the Rp 15.22 trillion that was overpaid, Didu said, Rp 5.4 trillion needed to be conditionally deducted as it was currently in dispute with the tax service.

“All this means that we have overpaid our taxes by [at least] Rp 9.8 trillion. The tax service has repeatedly made announcements about tax arrears, but says nothing about overpayments,” he complained.

Last week, Mochamad Tjiptardjo, director general of taxes at the Ministry of Finance, alleged that state enterprises owed Rp 19 trillion in back taxes, before backtracking to reduce the figure to Rp 7 trillion following howls of indignation from the State Enterprises Ministry.

On Friday night, Tjiptardjo told the Jakarta Globe that the two sides had met to discuss their differences and would set up a joint team to settle the dispute.

“We’ve just met Didu. We agreed to form a team of State Enterprise Ministry officials and tax officers to work on this. They’ll start working on it [this] week. They have their data, and we have ours. We will see who is right in the end,” Tjiptardjo said.

Meanwhile, Didu said the State Enterprises Ministry would work closely with the tax service to reconcile the differing data by Tuesday, when the two sides will hold another meeting.

On Oct. 9, Tjiptardjo warned that the tax service had only managed to collect Rp 377.86 trillion in taxes as of the end of September, or 71 percent of the year’s national target of Rp 528.35 trillion.

He said the shortfall was due in part to the domestic economic slowdown and a series of natural disasters.

To tackle the shortfall, he said the tax service would crack down on big-time tax defaulters, including major corporations, state enterprises and wealthy individuals.

He also warned that the tax service would not hesitate to “name and shame” them in the media.