Govt to pay civil servants

SURABAYA: A senior central government official here has firmly denied rumors that the administration would no longer be able to pay civil servants' salaries in three or four months' time.

Sunarko RM, head of the Civil Servant Affairs Administration Agency (BAKN), called on the public Monday not to believe the rumors and said the government would pay the salaries as usual.

Funds for government salaries are usually set aside in the state budget under the heading of "routine expenditures", he said, adding that the amount appropriated under the current budget had not been affected by the economic crisis.

The crisis has only led to a reduction in the amount allocated to "development expenditures", he said.

Sunarko said development expenditures covered government agency expansions and the costs of operations and maintaining facilities.

Citing an example, he said a government department's plans to build five buildings had to be scrapped under the current budget.

Asked about an apparent shrinkage in the civil servants corps, Sunarko said the government's personnel office had been adhering to a "minus growth" policy since 1995.

Under the policy, the personnel office would, for example, only recruit 60,000 new civil servants following the retirement of 80,000 government employees, he said.

The ideal number of civil servants in a country is 1 percent to 1.5 percent of the population. Indonesia now has a total of four million civil servants, nearly 2 percent of the population.