Desy Nurhayati, Jakarta – Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) said Monday that law enforcement had been slow to tackle corruption in government agencies in the first half of this year.
In its report analyzing corruption trends, launched Monday, the anticorruption group revealed that out of 132 corruption cases identified in the first half of this year, there were 51 new cases with total potential state losses of around Rp 665.8 billion (US$73.4 million).
The figure is much smaller than the 2006 second semester data provided by the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK), which identified 5,776 cases of alleged fund misuse in government agencies with state losses of up to Rp 13.3 trillion.
"Huge differences in the figures indicate that law enforcers are very slow in responding to and following up on the BPK's report on corruption cases in government agencies. It shows their poor performance," ICW researcher Febri Hendri told a media conference.
"The BPK report reveals that there are many corruption cases in the agencies. But why are only few of them being uncovered? The investigators should have worked faster to handle the cases by promptly taking action in response to the report."
Febri said the time the investigators had needed to investigate one case – two and a half years on average – was too long.
"Ideally, they should be able to reveal a case within one to one and a half years, based on the BPK report, which is usually published a year after the government agencies have started working on their programs."
The ICW collected data based on the daily reports of 26 national and 54 local media between Jan. 1 to June 30. According to the group, the 51 new cases were dominated by the central and local administrations as well as the social service sector. Most of the cases involved corruption in goods procurement, a total of 20 cases.
The group said that of the 132 cases recorded during the first semester, 81 were old cases being processed legally. The latter figure accounted for more than 60 percent of the total number of cases.
"It indicates that the law enforcers tend to focus on investigating old cases, which were first uncovered several years ago but have yet been settled due to their slowness, and pay less attention to new ones," Febri said.
The total 132 cases have inflicted Rp 7.9 trillion in losses on the state, with the banking sector contributing the lion's share of Rp 2.1 trillion in four cases.
ICW's Adnan Topan Husodo said law enforcement should cooperate better with the BPK so as to speed up their investigations.
He also said that they had to prioritize big and complicated cases, which had usually inflicted huge state losses, instead of only investigating smaller cases.
"However, it's hard for them to investigate big cases since such cases usually involve high-ranking officials that are difficult to probe," Adnan said.