Camelia Pasandaran – A recent audit of the campaign finance reports from this year's presidential and legislative polls was a waste of money as it failed to root out any violations, electoral watchdogs said on Thursday.
The General Elections Commission (KPU) spent more than Rp 5.2 billion ($541,000) to audit the reports from the legislative elections and nearly Rp 300 million to check those of the presidential race.
Engelbert Johannes Rohi, deputy secretary of the Independent Election Monitoring Committee (KIPP) dismissed the audit as a waste of money because it produced no significant results. "Compared to previous elections, there has been no follow up on any violations regarding campaign financing," he said.
The KPU announced the results of its presidential campaign audit on its Web site on Sept. 17, but only revealed the total donations received by each candidate and how much they had spent. It mentioned nothing about whether irregularities had been found.
Within a week of its release, however, the Elections Supervisory Board (Bawaslu) reported the campaign teams of all three presidential candidates to the police for alleged financial violations.
For the legislative elections, the KPU was late in publishing its audit and also in handing the report over to Bawaslu.
"We could not do anything about the audit results from the legislative elections because the KPU gave us the data too late," Bawaslu member Bambang Eka Cahya Widodo said. The board had only three to five days to file a complaint to the police.
Indonesia Corruption Watch in June suspected that at least Rp 161.3 billion in donations to several major political parties in the legislative elections were potentially fraudulent.
A study by the antigraft watchdog alleged that only three of the nine parties that secured seats in the House had clean campaign funding – the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), the National Awakening Party (PKB) and the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra).
The ICW on Wednesday said that the audit results were inaccurate and did not take into account the many allegations of irregularities put forward.
Ibrahim Fahmy Badoh, ICW coordinator for political affairs, said that the KPU should make the full reports public. "This way, the public can make a judgment on the three candidates."