Data Discrepancy: Hajj at an Unfinished Crossroads of Authority

Last week, a meeting of Commission VIII of the House of Representatives (DPR) with the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah (Kemenhaj) and the Hajj Financial Management Agency (BPKH) was temporarily suspended. Not because of policy substance, but because the financial accountability report for the 1447 H/2026 M hajj was only received by council members while the meeting was underway, and upon reading it, discrepancies were found in the number of pilgrims and the value of benefits between the records of Kemenhaj and BPKH.

The question that emerged was simple but pointed: if two state institutions that both ‘manage hajj’ cannot agree on the figures, who actually has authority over that data? This incident is not an ordinary administrative failure. It is a symptom of a legal design that has not yet fully answered a fundamental question since the hajj institutional reform was rolled out, namely where the boundary of authority lies between the technical organiser and the financial manager.

Law Number 14 of 2025 concerning the Third Amendment to Law Number 8 of 2019 on the Organisation of the Hajj and Umrah Pilgrimage established Kemenhaj, which took over the duties of the Directorate General of Hajj and Umrah Organisation at the Ministry of Religious Affairs. The aim was clear: to unify services, including health, accommodation, and transport for pilgrims under one roof, avoiding the overlapping authority that had long been complained about.

At the same time, Article 46 Paragraph 4 of the law also strengthened the role of BPKH, rather than merging it into Kemenhaj. The article grants this institution the authority to jointly determine the Hajj Pilgrimage Cost (BPIH) together with the Minister of Hajj and Umrah and the DPR.

This is a significant shift from BPKH’s previous status, which was often referred to merely as a ‘paymaster’ under Law Number 34 of 2014 on Hajj Financial Management. This change is normatively sensible, as BPKH, which manages hundreds of trillions of rupiah belonging to pilgrims, reasonably deserves a voice in determining how much of those funds are used.

But the problem lies not in the intention, but in the coordination architecture that accompanies it. Law 14/2025 and Presidential Regulation Number 92 of 2025 on the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah regulate the position and main duties of Kemenhaj in detail, but have not yet explicitly formulated a standard mechanism for how these two institutions, with different databases and recording systems, unify their figures before reporting to the public and the President.

Lawrence Friedman, in his legal system framework, distinguishes three elements: substance (the rules themselves), structure (the institutions that implement them), and legal culture (the behaviour and habits of actors within them). The pattern visible in Law 14/2025 shows a symptom common in institutional reform in Indonesia: legal substance moves quickly, while coordination structure lags behind.

The law has been enacted, the Presidential Regulation has been issued, and even BPKH Regulation Number 1 of 2026 already regulates the technicalities of pilgrims’ virtual accounts. However, the speed of regulation has not been matched by the maturity of coordination structures between two institutions that have both only recently been restructured, and it is this gap that allows pilgrim data and benefit values to still be recorded differently at the two institutions.

The post-reform challenge is no longer about the availability of regulation, but rather the ability to translate legal design into real collaborative governance on the ground. The unsynchronised data between Kemenhaj and BPKH is not merely a human error in recording.

It is evidence that the law in the books, namely the shared authority in determining BPIH, has not yet been translated into law in action in the form of an integrated reporting system that compels both institutions to work from the same database from the outset.

The debate over the BPIH 2027 financing scheme clarifies the stakes. BPKH itself, in its presentation to Commission VIII of the DPR, warned of a potential negative difference of Rp6.87 trillion in the 60:40 distribution scheme between benefit value and costs paid directly by pilgrims. On that occasion, BPKH also referred to the prohibition on using investment returns from one prospective pilgrim’s deposit to finance the departure of another pilgrim, in accordance with the Ijtima’ Ulama Decision of the MUI Fatwa Commission.

This shows that BPKH does not merely execute decisions, but actively corrects Kemenhaj’s proposals based on sharia considerations and financial prudence, precisely the function intended by Article 46 Paragraph 4. The question is: if this checks and balances function works well in the policy realm, why does it fail precisely in the realm of basic data reporting?

Gustav Radbruch taught that good law must balance three values: certainty (Rechtssicherheit), justice (Gerechtigkeit), and utility (Zweckmässigkeit). Textually, Law 14/2025 promises structural certainty: one ministry, one service roof, one door of responsibility.

Yet behind that structural simplification, the law actually maintains, even strengthens, the independence of BPKH’s financial authority separately. This is not an inconsistency, but a conscious choice: the state chooses to protect the independence of managing the people’s funds from unilateral intervention by technical authorities, with the consequence that must be paid in the form of higher coordination complexity between two institutions that are no longer in a single chain of command.

The separation of the two institutions from a single chain of command does not mean the design is flawed. Previous academic studies on the position of BPKH and comparative studies with Malaysia’s Hajj Pilgrims Fund Board (Lembaga Tabung Haji) actually show that the independence of the hajj financial manager from the technical organiser is a common, even recommended, practice to protect pilgrims’ interests from short-term political intervention.

In other words, the problem is not in the separation itself.