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.