Jakarta – Ever wondered why big-time graft criminals frequently avoid prison and jet out of the country, to spend their days and ill-gotten gains in "safe" countries like Singapore or the United States.
One could point to the lax efforts by the police, or the nation's prosecutors, in ensuring these criminals escape justice.
But these frequently on-the-take law enforcers couldn't do their job so badly if they didn't receive help from one of the most graft-ridden institutions of them all – the Immigration Office, a member of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) said Wednesday.
Ronny Ihram Maulana, the KPK's director of monitoring, said immigration, the nation's gatekeeper, lacked an adequate information technology system to properly detect suspects – even if officials weren't taking bribes to let criminals out.
He said the office still used old computer software, which did not have the capacity to update the records of convicts or suspects banned from leaving the country.
Computer records available at the immigration offices did not include photographs and other specific details of graft criminals, he said.
"Available data on these people only consists of their names and sex," Ronny said during a discussion on immigration at the Department of Justice and Human Rights. Neither could the data be shared among offices around the country – and there was no organized filing system.
The KPK has been investigating corruption at the immigration office for the past few months. Ronny said officers had found that human resource management was inadequate and an organized administrative system was sorely lacking.
There was not even an organized best-practice system for the interviewing, fingerprinting, photographing and identifying suspects, he said.
These lack of systems meant officials could frequently get away with charging more than the standard rate for services. "A lousy system fosters corrupt practices, such as excessive 'tipping' within the office," Ronny said.
But it is not only the KPK which thinks immigration offices are corrupt. So do the immigration officials, themselves.
At the panel discussion, Serang Immigration Office head Daud Afifi confessed that he had taken bribes from travelers in the past because of financial need. "One would be a hypocrite if he said he had never done anything corrupt at the immigration office," Daud said. He believed a lack of adequate pay and conditions for officials at immigration offices had fueled corruption there.
President Soesilo Bambang Yudhoyono was embarrassed recently by complaints from foreign investors about the number of corrupt immigration officials they encountered.
The State Minister of Administrative Reform, Taufik Effendi plans to restructure immigration by making it more autonomous and separating it from the Justice and Human Rights Ministry. This plan has been resisted by the ministry.
A member of the House of Representatives Commission III on immigration, Setya Novanto, said after the panel discussion that the immigration office should keep a close watch on the progress of cases at the Supreme Court.
"The immigration office has to keep up with these court cases, so that it knows the status of people being tried or investigated," Setya said. He said communication and cooperation between the Supreme Court, the Attorney General's Office and the Immigration Office must also be improved.
After the meeting, national immigration spokesman Cecep Soepriatna told The Jakarta Post that graft suspects usually fled the country before the Attorney General's Office had issued a travel ban on them.
"In the case of David Nusa Widjaya, his travel ban had already expired," he said, referring to the recently captured fugitive who was convicted of embezzling about Rp 1.3 trillion (about US$138 million) from Bank Indonesia.
Travel bans were issued by the Attorney General's Office, which normally immediately sent data, including the name, sex, and date of birth of banned people to immigration, he said.
Well-to-do criminals also often obtained fake passports and identification cards to pass through immigration checkpoints. The immigration office planned to upgrade Indonesian passports with biometric fingerprints and "iris" identification cards to handle passport fraud, he said. "Hopefully the immigration office will implement the technology next year," he said.