Vaudine England, Jakarta – The police, the judiciary, Customs and the Tax Department are the most corrupt institutions in Indonesia, a survey has found.
The first professional survey to measure corruption from the viewpoints of the civil service, the business community and ordinary people found corruption was the biggest problem facing Indonesia, outstripping unemployment and the economic crisis.
Most Indonesians' daily lives are affected by graft – be it bribes to be paid to get one's child into "free" state schools or the pay-offs required to get through the traffic police every morning. More shocking was the finding that public institutions with clearly defined budget allocations from the state still had to pay bribes to receive the allocation.
With traffic police heading the list of most corrupt bodies, top honours for a lack of corruption went to the postal service – established by Dutch colonialists and now both old-fashioned and strangely efficient.
Despite reports that some journalists still expect "transport" money or food to cover an event, the news media and religious organisations were also judged to be in the cleanest category, with the media increasingly active in exposing corrupt behaviour.
The judiciary scored badly in the wake of its failed efforts to prosecute the Suharto family for corruption, as did tax and Customs officials, who regularly take bribes instead of ensuring full payment of tax due to the state.
Responses from the business community proved that those who paid bribes on procurement contracts did significantly more business than companies that did not – or did not pay enough. More revealing was the finding that business people would rather pay more taxes if it meant paying fewer bribes.
Fifty-six per cent of respondents agreed with this idea and more than half of those were ready to pay more than five per cent of company revenues toward eliminating unofficial payments.
Most respondents made a distinction between gifts and money, with gifts – no matter how valuable – not considered as bribes. Investigations by local media have recently exposed how MPs routinely expect bribes to ensure their attendance at committee meetings, and will sell their votes on key issues to the highest bidder.
Often the pay-offs appear in the form of cars, houses, air tickets or trinkets, rather than money. Almost everyone surveyed agreed the cause of corruption lay in the low salaries given to civil servants and their lack of accountability.
The study was commissioned by the Partnership for Governance Reform, a coalition of several organisations, including the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and Indonesian non-governmental organisations. The partnership hired a professional polling company, Insight, to conduct the research through face-to-face interviews with 650 officials, 1,250 households and 400 executives across 14 provinces.
"We hope with this, we can now build a strategy for how to attack corruption and that we can have a clear map of the public perceptions of corruption in all its forms – from the petty daily payments, to the big fish," said Andi Mallarangeng, of the Partnership for Governance Reform. "The silent majority is amplified in this survey and we are hoping we can help create public anger about corruption," he said.
Mr Mallarangeng added that although petty, much corruption had become endemic and many people felt helpless in the fight against it. His office plans to follow up with a closer look on the direct impact of corruption on the poor. This ranges from the payments required by local neighbourhood bosses for "security" and the bribes demanded of vendors and hawkers, whose means of livelihood have been confiscated by police in raids.
The survey also highlighted the costs to foreign business confidence in Indonesia. The publication of the World Economic Forum's "2001 Global Competitiveness Report" drove the point home by downgrading Indonesia to 64th place on a list of 75 countries, from 44th last year.
Commenting on the forum's survey results, Gadjah Mada University economist Sri Adiningsih said the drop in rank was "pitiful", adding it was closely tied to "unsupportive" government policies and the high number of levies and duties.