In Reply to: Apologies re tax posted by Tina G on Tuesday, 8. September 2009 at 07:48 Bali Time:
Tina, the tax thing is a bit of a farce. Over a certain annual turnover an establishment has to collect and pay Govt. tax, the same as with GST in Oz. The rate is always 10% that is added to the bill, the variation comes with service charge which is the establishment's own "tax" to supposedly pay to the staff as a tip. It varies from zero to the highest I have seen is 10%. The govt. tax is added to the bill after the service charge has been added so sometimes you will see an odd figure for tax & service of 15.5% or 21%. The farce is that places like Murni Warung (without naming names - not!) collect the 10% tax but regularly only pay about 4% as it is negotiable (like most things in Indo).