Govt wants reliable contractors

TANGERANG: Starting this year, the Tangerang regency office will require contractors who bid for development projects to have a bank balance amounting to at least 10 percent of the value of the project.

"With such a requirement, the contractors can no longer play hide and seek with us," Regent Ismet Iskandar told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.

That way, Ismet said, the administration can minimize additional expenditure for public facilities, which is financed by taxpayers.

"We had had numerous experiences with bad contractors who reduced the value of the project by 60 percent," he said, adding that several contractors had even neglected to complete the project and still taken their payment.

Deputy chairman of Tangerang chapter of the Indonesian Construction Companies Association (Gapeksindo), Khaerudin, said that such a requirement should only be enforced for medium to large companies.

He also demanded that the administration expedite the issuance of construction permits "because the slow bureaucracy had hampered the implementation, raising the cost of the project". -- JP