Margareth S. Aritonang, Jakarta – The Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) is reporting that the government has "improperly" continued to hire civil servants at a cost of trillions of rupiah.

The BPK's audit of official spending in the second half of 2011 said that the central government spent Rp 180.62 trillion (US$18 billion) to pay its employees in the full year for 2011, up from Rp 90.42 trillion in 2007.

Meanwhile, local administrations spent Rp 226.54 trillion on their employees in 2011, up from Rp 119.25 trillion, the BPK said. The combined payroll for 2011 was Rp 407.16 trillion, or about 33.1 percent of the state budget of Rp 1,229 trillion.

There were a combined 4.57 million civil servants working for the central government and provincial, regency and municipal administrations in 2011, according to the audit, which was submitted to the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

Officials apparently flouted a moratorium and continued to hire more employees, expanding the ranks of the civil service by 503,617 between 2007 and 2011, a 12.38 percent increase, according to the audit.

Swelling bureaucracy was attributed to the absence of a comprehensive strategy on hiring. A BPK auditor told reporters on Tuesday that the government should be faulted for recruiting poor candidates between 2009 and 2010.

"We don't have an exact number for these poor quality applicants," BPK auditor J. Widodo Mumpuni said on Tuesday. "The point is that the recruitment process for civil servants has not been conducted under the proper mechanism."

Widodo said that the irregular recruitment process had cost the government more money. BPK deputy chief Hasan Bisri said the government had to cap recruitment.

"The government has increased the number of civil servants every year, despite the absence of a grand design on how many workers it actually needs in each institution," Hasan said. "We did not get this information while doing the audit," he said.

Growth in the civil service proceeded despite a moratorium on recruitment from September 2011 to December 2012.

The Administrative Reforms Ministry said in October, before the moratorium expired, that the government would hire 70,000 people to replace half of 130,000 retiring civil servants in 2013.

Of the 4.522 million civil servants on the payroll as of June 2012, the National Civil Service Agency (BKN) said 1.6 million, or around 34.81 percent, were university graduates; while 657, 197, or 14.53 percent, held polytechnic diplomas.

Analyst Siti Zuhro from the Indonesian Science Institute (LIPI) called on the government to extend the moratorium until the House completed its deliberation on a bill on civil servants.

"This bill will set the standard of competence as well as the salary for civil servants. Thus, the recruitment for civil servants will be more transparent and rigorous. There will be no more collusive practices," Siti told The Jakarta Post.