Jakarta – An ongoing dispute between the Supreme Court (MA) and the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) took a new turn Saturday, with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono summoning both parties to the Presidential Office to reach a settlement.
The meeting was chaired by the President and attended by Chief Justice Bagir Manan and BPK chairman Anwar Nasution, with Constitutional Court (MK) chairman Jimly Asshiddiqie and a number of Cabinet ministers and high-ranking officials attending as witnesses.
The meeting concluded with both parties agreeing that the court's administrative fees were not tax revenue, but were still subject to an audit.
"The government will soon issue a regulation on administrative fees. The Supreme Court will then issue an internal regulation and make (necessary bookkeeping) adjustments so that the agency is able to audit the funds," Yudhoyono said, as quoted by detik.com.
"Therefore, the audit for this year's administrative fees will be conducted early next year," the President said.
Yudhoyono said such conflicts were unavoidable due to ongoing reform in the country's justice system. He said the state financial system was also undergoing reform in order to create a system which was transparent and accountable.
"It was important to find a systemic solution immediately, not a compromising one, so government activities could continue to run," he said.
However, legislator Gayus Lumbuun from the House of Representatives' legal commission said the President's initiative to bring the two parties together was inappropriate and the dispute should have been settled in the Constitutional Court.
"Yudhoyono's move may ease the pain, but not heal the wound. Such an institutional conflict cannot be politically settled by the country's highest institution, including the President," Gayus said. "Therefore, the conflict should be settled via a legal process (at the Constitutional Court)."
The dispute made headlines over the past week, with both parties using separate regulations to justify their stance on administrative fees.
The Supreme Court argued that administrative fees were not state tax revenue and therefore were not subject to a BPK audit. The agency, however, said all funds paid by the public for services they received from the state were state revenue, including administrative fees. Therefore, institutions refusing the audit of such funds were acting illegally.
Gayus said the Constitutional Court should look into the dispute, regardless of an article in the 2003 law on the Constitutional Court that stipulates the Supreme Court cannot be the subject of a state financial dispute.
"In financial disputes anywhere in the world, the Supreme Court is exempt. But here we have had the experience of a past dispute between the Judicial Commission and the Supreme Court, which was later settled through the Constitutional Court," Gayus said.
Other possible ways to settle the dispute were through judicial reviews of Civil Code Procedures, the state financial law and the state financial examination and management law, he said.