Govt embarks on nationwide screening of civil servants
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."