Govt embarks on nationwide screening of civil servants

Tiarma Siboro, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government will start a one-month nationwide "re- registration" of civil servants on Tuesday in what it claims will be the most effective way to unify all members of the state apparatus.

Minister of Administrative Reforms M. Feisal Tamin said on Monday that the re-registration would be conducted by the State Personnel Agency (BKN) and would cost the government around Rp 11 billion (US$1.3 million).

Feisal added that the process would not include a test to determine loyalty to the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia or NKRI, except for those from Aceh.

"We actually do not need to screen them, because all civil servants have taken their oaths to be loyal to the country. A similar oath is also required each time they receive a promotion.

"However, if a local administration, such as Aceh, insists upon attaching supplementary material to measure loyalty to the state, we will allow them to do so," Feisal told reporters at his office.

Feisal's statement contradicted an earlier remark by Minister of Home Affairs Hari Sabarno who said that the testing would weed out all civil servants who were not loyal to the NKRI throughout the country.

Hari said that the government would be able to determine loyalty by the answers given.

The screening, or locally known as litsus, was utilized by the New Order administration to screen out people associated with the banned Indonesian Communist Party from the government.

Feisal, however, said that it would be different from the screening under the New Order regime.

He said the re-registration was merely a procedural matter in order to get more updated data about civil servants and build a comprehensive database on them.

He said there had not been a proper database of civil servants in the past 30 years.

The country held its first registration of civil servants in 1974 when the country recorded 1.6 million civil servants. Since that time, the country never again conducted a comprehensive registration of civil servants.

Now, Feisal said, there were around three million civil servants, but the figure was not precise.

According to Feisal, the country's state institutions in charge of keeping data on civil servants such as the Central Bureau of Statistics, BKN and the Ministry of Finance's Directorate of Budget, all have different figures on civil servants.

"We tried to reconcile all that conflicting data provided by these institutions in March this year, but we found sharp differences among them," he said.

The differences included 215,000 inaccurate dates of birth, 65 gender inaccuracies, 102 conflicts with regard to religion and 167 people had more than one place of birth.

Feisal said that all civil servants must take the re- registration. "All those who attempt to circumvent this process will be subject to termination from their jobs."