Dessy Sagita – Labor activists demanded on Friday that four state-owned insurance companies immediately comply with the terms of a pending bill on social security, in a bid to minimize the potential for corruption.

Said Iqbal, secretary general of the Social Security Action Committee (KAJS), which consists of 67 labor unions from the Greater Jakarta area, said that as long as the companies remained answerable only to the government, they would find a way to skirt the provision in the bill requiring them to provide unlimited public access to review their financial records.

"As long as these four companies don't make the transition from state-owned limited liability companies to public bodies, we will always have very limited rights to conduct monitoring and surveillance of their financial reports," he said.

"But once they are operating as nonprofit pubic bodies under the BPJS [social security providers] bill, where everything must be out in the open, we can easily track down where the insurance premiums go and hence minimize the potential for corruption."

The four companies in question are Askes, which insures civil servants; Asabri, for members of the armed forces; Jamsostek, for private-sector employees; and Taspen, which covers workers at state-owned companies.

Under a 2004 law, the government is mandated to form special bodies – known as BPJS – to manage social security for health care, occupational hazards, pensions and life insurance.

The BPJS bill, which is being deliberated at the House of Representatives, requires that the four existing state-owned insurers make fundamental changes in their operations in order to qualify as BPJS social security providers, including greater budgetary transparency and a change to non-profit status. However, the government has said this transformation could take 10 to 15 years to complete.

Armida Alisjahbana, the head of the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas), previously said the process would be lengthy and difficult because the companies were large.

However, Febri Hendri, a senior researcher at Indonesia Corruption Watch, said there was no sensible reason that would justify the transformation taking such a long time.

"The merger of major banks only takes a few years, and in principle a merger and a transformation are not that different," he said. "So we have to question why transforming the four bodies to comply with BPJS principles should take so long."

He added the public needed access to key financial data, including how much the state insurers were paying out in incentives and benefits to top executives, how many members each of the companies had, how much they were investing and the dividends they were collecting, and how they were managing those investments and returns.