Prabowo Says 'Underinvoicing' Causes Low Salaries for Teachers, Law Enforcement Officers, and Civil Servants

JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com — Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has pointed to a factor behind the small salaries of teachers, law enforcement officers (APH) and civil servants (ASN). One factor is underinvoicing, or fraud by exporters or importers by reporting false data to the government. ‘This is what is causing the salaries of teachers to be small, the salaries of law enforcement officers to be small, the salaries of civil servants to be small. This is what keeps the budget insufficient, the budget not strong, and so on,’ Prabowo said at the Parliament Building in Jakarta on Wednesday, 20 May 2026. ‘Over 34 years what has happened? What has happened is what is called underinvoicing.’ This occurs because businesspeople do not report honestly the goods they sell or buy abroad. ‘Many of them set up companies abroad. They sell from their domestic company to their foreign company, with prices far below the actual price,’ he explained. According to him, the practice of underinvoicing is a form of fraud on paper. ‘Because of this, suppose we can lie at Indonesian ports; we can lie in our country; we ship 10,000 tonnes of coal but report only 5,000 tonnes, it can happen in Indonesia. There, (the destination country) cannot; there it is recorded,’ he stated.