Jakarta – Indonesia's state audit agency has discovered that around 6.421 trillion rupiah from the state budget has been misused by various government offices in the first six months of this year.
The State Audit Agency (BPK) announced the figure at a plenary meeting with legislators from the House of Representatives to discuss a budget increase request from the Defence Ministry.
At least eight state agencies – including Indonesian embassies in Singapore and Beijing, the armed forces, the national police, the army and the Defence Ministry – had used the funds inappropriately between January and June of this year, the agency said in a report. Topping the chart in the report was the air force with irregularities reaching 745 million rupiah. The army was found to have misused 250 million rupiah or about 18 per cent of its budget.
The report said irregularities involving 14.5 billion rupiah were found in the embassies while misappropriation of around 27.5 billion rupiah was found in the Forestry Ministry.
The agency said that some 4.2 billion rupiah of foreign funding intended for providing export credit facilities in the Defence Ministry, the armed forces and the national police were also missing. Last year, state, regional offices and government-owned undertakings misused funds amounting to 36.5 trillion rupiah.
The BPK report urged parliament to follow up on its past findings on irregularities before it approves next year's state budget revision.
"The House should exert control over the bureaucracy regarding various improper expenditures before deciding to approve the proposed state budget revision for fiscal 2003," the deputy chairman of the agency, Mr I Gede Artjana, said.
He said the House had failed to follow up on its past findings and to impose strong sanctions against corrupt officials.
"This country's legal system has various laws for various violations, but I do not see a determination on the part of the House to maximise its efforts" in bringing corrupt officials to court, he said.
The Criminal Code and the Anti-Corruption Law allow the authorities to bring bureaucrats before the court if they are suspected of misusing state funds, he added.
Last month, the Berlin-based group Transparency International, which rated 102 nations on how corrupt-free they were, ranked Indonesia 96th, on par with Kenya and ahead of Angola, Madagascar, Paraguay, Nigeria and Bangladesh.