Dicky Christanto – Loopholes in budgeting laws and the national political system are blamed for the lack of political accountability among members of the House of Representatives.
The House's budgetary powers, which are overwhelmingly broad and lack any check-and-balance mechanism, have often been misused by legislators to accumulate financial resources for the benefit of their parties.
These expanded budgetary powers were a result of the 1998 reform movement, which sought to reverse the executive-heavy system that had relegated the House as a mere "rubber stamp" for nearly all budget items proposed by the government.
Members of the House's budget committee are now allowed to intervene in the details of state-funded projects, locally known as satuan tiga, which identify and allocate funding to the smallest units of organization in the bureaucracy.
Such mechanisms and rights are rarely found in developed democracies, in which the budgetary role of the legislature is limited to general priorities, and to whether or not certain public projects are responsive to public interests.
The committee's right to withhold budget approval until certain conditions in the proposed projects are met, has provided leeway for members to negotiate with bureaucrats, agency and regional leaders and private contractors to seek kick-backs in return for approval.
The recent graft cases involving the procurement of copies of the Koran by the Religious Affairs Ministry, the construction of the Hambalang sports compound in Bogor, West Java, by the Youth and Sports Ministry, the disbursement of regional infrastructure funds, and the National Games venue in Riau have utilized this loophole.
Several legislators from different parties have been dragged down by these cases.
The most notable case revolves around the disbursement of regional infrastructure funds, in which budget committee member and a suspect in the case, Wa Ode Nurhayati, testified about the involvement of nearly all 85 of her fellow committee members. Her trial is currently ongoing.
Despite numerous cases of graft, little has been done to improve check-and-balance mechanisms at the House, where it is becoming increasingly complicated to discharge corrupt members. The House ethics committee, which was not formed until 2009 to internally handle recalcitrant legislators, has yet to function as expected.
If a particular representative is convicted of an ethical breech, for example, follow-up on the ethics council's ruling depends entirely on the decision of the representative's respective party leadership.
Party leaders have often refused to comply with ethics council verdicts in what seems to be tacit approval of politicians who seek political donations from state-funded projects.
The lack of regulations on political party financing and money-politics is often used as the excuse for tolerating such practices.
Director of Gadjah Mada University's Anticorruption Studies Center Zainal Mochtar Arifin said the political parties should reform the way they go about raising funds. "Stricter parameters regarding financing models should be applied in order uphold a high degree of accountability," he said.
Under the national political system, House members are also in a very strong position where nobody can file motions against them. Even President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who has a strong popular mandate, does not hold the right to veto House decisions.
This situation has left law enforcement agencies on the forefront of the battle to root out graft in the House.
However, as reform in such agencies remains sluggish, with many judges, police officers and prosecutors having been implicated in graft cases, the outcome has been less than expected.
The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) is probably the only institution that has aggressively pursued corrupt politicians.
Big cases such as the Koran procurement, the construction of the Hambalang sports compound, the disbursement of regional infrastructure funds, and the National Games venue are all being handled by KPK.
Legislator Eva Kusuma Sundari of the House's Commission III on law and security affairs said that there was so much to be done to improve the check-and-balance mechanisms in the House that relying only on the KPK and other law enforcement agencies would not be effective in the long term.
"There's an absence of institutionalized political accountability. This has led many politicians to act shamefully," she said.
"The massive mentality of corruption has spread widely among lawmakers in the absence of serious monitoring efforts and firm punishments for those who have been proven guilty."