Try calls for better supervision

JAKARTA (JP): Vice President Try Sutrisno acknowledged yesterday that thousands of cases of irregularities have occurred at the Ministry of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications.

Speaking at a meeting with officials of the ministry, Try blamed the deviations within the bureaucracy on the poor supervision of employees.

He said that internal supervision was the most essential aspect needed to guarantee that an organization ran well.

"Many deviations, abuses of power, financial leaks as well as financial mismanagement in state offices happen because internal supervision is not good," Try said.

Try, who was making an official visit to the ministry, was accompanied by Minister of Finance Mar'ie Muhammad and Minister of Administrative Reforms T.B. Silalahi.

Try said that officials of the Ministry of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications should understand thoroughly the meaning of internal supervision and not see it only as a superior's form of control over his or her staff.

"Internal supervision is both the act of monitoring and a means of control by the leader of an organization or a working unit. It is meant to ensure that every division within the organization functions well and has orderly and accurate relations with other divisions," he said.

"In the end, the success of managing this will produce the best performance the organization could ever have," Try added.

He pointed out that tight supervision should not be considered the task only of officials holding functional positions in government agencies.

"State employees must be watched over by internal supervision, functional supervision and public supervision," he said.

Cases

Minister of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications Joop Ave reported to the Vice President yesterday that the office of the ministry's Inspector General unveiled 1,304 cases of various misdeeds during the 1993/1994 fiscal year.

All of these, Joop said, have been dealt with.

In the 1994/1995 fiscal year, 1,132 cases were discovered and 839 of them (74.11 percent) were legally dealt with, while in the 1995/1996 period, 313 cases were found and 62 (19.81 percent) followed up.

Thus over the last three years, 2,749 cases were reported, of which 2,205 (80.02 percent) were investigated.

Joop yesterday also up-dated Try with the latest achievements of his ministry.

"We established a tourism consolidation forum late last year with the task of setting up intersectoral policies and recommendations to make tourism the country's number one foreign currency earner by the year 2005," he said.

In the beginning of the First Five-Year Development Plan (Repelita I) in 1969, the tourism sector gained US$10.8 million in revenues from 86,100 foreign tourists visiting the country.

In 1993, or by the end of the Fifth Five-Year Development Plan (Repelita V), the sector managed to reap $3.9 billion, almost four times of that in 1969, from 3.4 million foreign tourists.

Last year, it gained $5.2 billion from 4.3 million foreign tourists.

Try, in a question and answer session, also heard from the ministry's staff of the first to third echelons and heads of the state-owned companies overseen by the ministry. (pwn)