Raymond Bonner, Jakarta – As the United States and other world governments prepare to channel hundreds of millions of aid dollars to the tsunami-ravaged regions of Aceh, Indonesia's culture of corruption has emerged as a major concern.

A daylong seminar Wednesday on corruption here, a joint effort by the United Nations, the Indonesian government and a number of private, nongovernmental groups, reflects the magnitude the problem.

The first speaker, a government minister, spoke about "Eliminating Corruption Within the Bureaucracy." Then came the attorney general, who spoke about "Eliminating Corruption in the Attorney General's Office," then the chief of police, whose topic was "Eliminating Corruption Within the Police." In the afternoon, the head of the Supreme Court, the minister of justice and the minister of finance spoke about "eliminating corruption" in their jurisdictions.

The corruption here starts at the top. Last Thursday, Monsanto admitted to paying a bribe of $50,000 to a senior official in the Ministry of the Environment in exchange for dropping a requirement for an environmental impact statement. The company was fined $1 million by the United States Department of Justice.

That a public official had been bribed by a foreign company surprises few, if any, here. It is taken for granted that no one does business in Indonesia without paying bribes, routinely disguised as "consultants' fees," to government ministers and heads of agencies, many of whom have retired with hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed in accounts in Singapore and elsewhere.

Even before the tsunami, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former general who was elected in September, had promised a campaign against corruption, a promise met with hope, but skepticism, given the entrenched nature of the problem, foremost in the military.

Mr. Yudhoyono has a reputation for being indecisive, but the deluge of aid coming in has forced him to take action to assure donors that it will not be wasted. He is not placing any trust in his government agencies.

Rather, he has turned to a non-governmental agency, Indonesia Corruption Watch, for help, asking the nonprofit group to set up a program for monitoring the aid to Aceh, said Luky Djani, who is heading up the Aceh project.

The problems will not surface immediately, in the emergency relief phase, said Mr. Djani. Maybe some food or other supplies will be siphoned off by a soldier or corrupt official, but that is minor, he said.

The opportunities for serious theft will come in the rehabilitation and reconstruction phase, Mr. Djani said, which the government has said will cost about $3 billion. That will create lots of temptations, in a country where there are no conflict of interest laws and government officials have long seen public office as a vehicle for private gain.

Mr. Djani said there were no mechanisms for ensuring that the needs were not inflated by government agencies, local and national, in order to get more money. The Ministry of Health might overstate the number of hospitals needed, the Ministry of Education might call for more schools than needed, he said.

And what if some official says he needs to rebuild about 20 miles of road, how do we know it is not only 100 yards? he asked. "We don't even know how many refugees there are," he said.

Mr. Djani said that the monitoring project would use volunteers as well as paid staff and that he hoped to have 50 people working in Aceh.

Currently, he said, the project has only about $2,000 on hand and needs about $120,000 to finance its operations for two years. The Asia Foundation and nonprofit groups in the Netherlands and Belgium have offered financial assistance, he said.

Corruption in Indonesia is ingrained and systematic, he said. For example, to get a driver's license through the normal channels can take five months, which, he said, is how long he has been waiting. But, if you pay $20 or so, you join the express line and get it in one day.

At the land title agency, he said, they have a pricing formula, depending on the size and location of your plot. You can pay in advance or over time, he said.

Civil servants do not earn much, but the opportunities for money under the table are so great that people pay bribes to get the jobs. The most sought-after jobs, in Jakarta's tax office, cost more than $500, he said.

But people consider the money well spent because they earn it back fast, he said, snapping his fingers, usually in less than a year.

Perhaps reflecting the depth of the corruption here, you even have to pay a bribe to get into the police academy, and thousands of dollars to become an officer, Mr. Djani said.