Hans David Tampubolon, Jakarta – Finance Minister Agus Martowardojo has called on government institutions to make serious efforts to deal with massive abuse of travel budgets, which has tended to increase lately despite tight controls imposed by his ministry.
"Generally, we have a huge state budget and if the BPK finds leaks caused by irregular practices, then those who conduct such wrongdoings should be considered as criminals," Agus told reporters on Friday.
"Therefore, all ministerial and state institutions must be able to monitor the travel budgets of their officials closely and set an example," he added.
The Finance Ministry's budgeting director general Herry Poernomo said that the government had actually tried its best to closely monitor the utilization of state-official travel budgets but for some reason, new monitoring policies often sparked more creativity among state bodies to continue misusing their authority and facilities.
The initial reform of monitoring policies was taken during the tenure of Sri Mulyani as finance minister, according to Herry. He said that Mulyani shifted travel-budgeting policy from being based on "lump sum" to an "at-cost" basis.
Under the lump-sum basis, state officials were given a fixed amount of money that they could utilize for their traveling needs while under the other system, an organization must be held accountable for every penny spent. The latter means that if an official is given Rp 1 million (US$108) for tickets but only uses Rp 600,000, then he or she must return Rp 400,000 to the state along with an official receipt.
Herry said that the "at-cost" policy managed to reduce misuse of travel budget utilization but on the other hand some state bodies were still trying to embezzle taxpayers' money.
"They began to forge boarding passes. For example, an official claims to have flown by Garuda and submits his boarding pass. In reality, he used a cheaper flight and forged the boarding pass," Herry said.
Herry added that due to the popularity of boarding-pass forgeries among state officials, services to produce such products began circulating.
Herry said that Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) auditors had at the same time improved their auditing competencies to track down forged boarding passes by directly contacting the airlines or travel companies for official documentation of passenger lists.
However, Herry also said that it would be hard for the government to fully eliminate the misuse of travel budgets because those kinds of practices were mostly conducted through collusion between officials themselves.
The BPK report for the second semester of the 2011 financial year found around 180 cases of suspicious travel budget utilizations with a total potential loss of Rp 34.59 billion.
The state travel budget stands at around Rp 18 trillion annually based on data from the state reform ministry while Indonesian Forum for Budget Transparency (FITRA) coordinator Ucok Sky Khadafi said that the budget could amount to Rp 23.9 trillion for the year 2012.
In 2009, travel-budget misuse in 35 state institutions amounted to around Rp 73.5 billion and in 2010 this increased to Rp 89.5 billion.