Revenue Intensification to Improve Financial Strength of Medan City: A SWOT Analysis

A financial strength is a very important factor for a local government because it can support the government function, providing goods and services to the society. The main sources of the financing are tax revenues from hotels, restaurants, entertainments, and parking. There are some obstacles to collect these taxes with the self-assessment system because the taxpayers are reluctant to report the actual income. Besides these tax revenues, the property tax, such as land and building taxes have some problems for collecting. This paper proposes the intensification strategy by using SWOT analysis to strength Medan City’s financing. A semi-structured interviewing is conducted to respondents, such as local tax officers, central tax officers, tax lecturers, and taxpayers to collect data and information about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. After making SWOT analysis, the results are discussed with the respondents. This paper proposes 12 strategies to increase property tax and 17 strategies to increase tax revenues from hotels, restaurants, entertainments, and parking. These strategies generate 5 policies to monitor, update data, increase human resources, counsel and socialize, improve coordinating, and cooperate with other units.