Jakarta – Traffic police, customs and tax officials, and the judiciary were ranked the most corrupt institutions in Indonesia's public sector, according to a recent survey.

The survey, part of a governance study conducted for the Partnership for Governance Reform, concluded that corruption was seen as Indonesia's most serious problem ahead of unemployment and the economic crisis.

Initiated in October of last year and completed in March, the survey was done using face-to-face interviews with 650 officials, 1,250 households and 400 business executives in 14 provinces. About 75 per cent of all respondents regarded corruption in the public sector as very common, while 65 per cent of household respondents reported actually experiencing corruption involving public officials.

Other institutions ranked as highly corrupt were the tax office, the ministries of public works, justice, forestry and immigration, and political parties. All respondents ranked the news media, post office and religious groups as the least corrupt.

The study also found that the average number of bribes paid by households appeared to increase with the frequency of contact with public officials. "Corruption extracts a high cost from society with between 1 per cent and 5 per cent of household income, official salary or company revenue spent on unofficial payments," an executive summary of the survey report said.

The study also discovered that companies that paid more bribes on procurement contracts had significantly more business dealings with the government. The high cost related to corruption was cited by business respondents as one of the main reasons for not investing in Indonesia.

Most respondents differentiated between gifts and money and did not consider gifts as bribes per se, regardless of their value. With regards to the causes of corruption, the three groups of respondents showed a strong consensus, citing low civil service salaries as the main factor and the lack of control and accountability of public officials as the second main reason.

The Partnership for Governance Reform is a collaboration between several international organisations, including the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme and the Asian Development Bank, and Indonesia's business community and non-governmental organisations. It aims at pushing and supporting a governance reform agenda with anti-corruption as its top priority.