Customs, traffic police the most corrupt: Survey

Customs, traffic police the most corrupt: Survey

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The traffic police, customs and tax authority and the
judiciary were ranked the most corrupt institutions in the public
sector, according to a governance diagnostic study on Indonesia
conducted for the Partnership for Governance Reform by the
research center.

The study concluded that corruption was seen as the country's
most serious problem ahead of unemployment and the economic
crisis.

The study consisted of two parts covering the commissioning of
14 research papers on different topics related to corruption and
the findings of a national survey on corruption aimed at three
groups of respondents: business enterprises, households and
public officials.

The results of the survey and the research papers will be
discussed further in a series of workshops here starting on
Friday to develop the most comprehensive, effective framework for
an anti-corruption program.

The survey itself, initiated last October and completed in
March, was conducted through face-to-face interviews with 650
officials, 1,250 households and 400 business executives in 14
provinces.

The Partnership for Governance Reform is a collaboration
between several international organizations, including the World
Bank, United Nations Development Program, Asian Development Bank,
the Indonesian business community and non-governmental
organizations. It aims at pushing and supporting a governance
reform agenda with anti-corruption as its top priority.

The survey was a semi-structured questionnaire containing a
range of questions formulated to gauge the public's perception of
corruption in the public sector, the legal system, corrupt
attitudes and behavior and general beliefs on the causes of
corruption.

Around 75 percent of all respondents regarded corruption in
the public sector as very common, while 65 percent of household
respondents reported actually experiencing corruption involving
public officials.

Other institutions ranked as highly corrupt were the tax
office, the ministries of public works, justice, forestry and
immigration, and political parties.

All respondents ranked the news media, post office and
religious organizations as the least corrupt.

The study also found that the average number of bribes paid by
households appeared to increase with the frequency of contact
with public officials.

"Corruption extracts a high cost from society with between 1
percent and 5 percent of household income, official salary or
company revenue spent on unofficial payments," an executive
summary of the survey report said.

The study also discovered that companies that paid more bribes
on procurement contracts did significantly more business with the
government than companies that did not pay bribes or paid only
small amounts.

The high cost related to corruption was cited by business
respondents as one of the main reasons for not investing in
Indonesia.

Quite interesting though was the finding that 56 percent of
the business respondents were willing to pay additional taxes if
corruption could be eliminated, and of those willing to do so
over half were prepared to pay more than 5 percent of company
revenues toward eliminating unofficial payments.

This finding provided an indirect estimate of the potential
size of tax revenue lost through corruption based on the
willingness of companies to pay for the elimination of corruption
and was an indication of the fiscal cost of corruption to the
state budget.

The survey confirmed what has so far only been suspected,
namely that public institutions had to pay in order to receive
budget allocations. This diversion of funds reduced the amount of
resources available to the institutions administering the public
service, thus lowering the quality of their services.

The study made an interesting finding related to the recent
controversy over a number of state officials who reported most of
their personal assets as gifts from family members or relatives.

Most respondents differentiated between gifts and money and
did not consider gifts as bribes per se regardless of their
value.

With regards to the causes of corruption, the three groups of
respondents showed a strong consensus, citing low civil servant
salaries as the main factor with the lack of control and
accountability of public officials as the second main reason.

The study concluded that quality management practices in
procurement, budget, and personnel processes backed up by strong
anti-corruption organizational orientation, limited discretion,
and the implementation of rules were found to be strongly related
to lower levels of corruption in public institutions.