Despite regulations and a blueprint for reform, the government lacks the conviction to shake up the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy, a senior official has said.
Administrative Reforms Deputy Minister Eko Prasojo said the country’s successive government has never been serious about making its current overstaffed, underproductive, expensive and graft-ridden bureaucracy into a slim, efficient, competent and service-oriented organization.
“We are actually running short of competent government workers, while at the same time employing too many civil servants who act like deadwood,” Eko said in a recent interview.
Other reports have made it clear that Eko, a professor in public administration and the brains behind the plan to reform the bureaucracy, has not overstated the situation.
The Supreme Audit Agency (BPK), for example, recently released an audit that said that 4.57 million civil servants worked for the central or regional governments, costing the state a whopping Rp 407.16 trillion (US$41.96 billion), or about one-third of the state budget of Rp 1,229 trillion, which the agency deemed excessive.
In some regencies, particularly newly established ones, the BPK said that personnel expenditures topped 60 percent of the local budget.
Eko said that bureaucratic restructuring could start with trimming structural posts and weeding out non-performing personnel, which would in turn help the government reduce personnel expenditures.
“Obviously, there will be a cut in spending for pay, the unnecessary procurement of goods and services as well as travel allowances,” Eko said.
‘“We may have to cut some programs due to overlapping structures and programs. The state has spent too much on programs and activities that don’t relate to one another.”
Eko said that reform could start by ministries eliminating two or three of their directorates general and barring ministers from the common practice of appointing any number of aides handpicked from their political parties.
While change must start from the top; in reality, the central government has failed to set an example, Eko said.
“It is imperative that the structure of central government be thinned out, because of its responsibility in setting norms, standards, procedure sand general policies,” Eko said. “In reality the opposite has been happening: The central bureaucracy is swelling.”
Eko said that reform would produce efficiencies that would improve the remuneration system without increasing the state budget.
The administration of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has raised the salaries of civil servants and members of the Indonesian Military and the National Police almost every year to provide incentives to boost performance and curb corruption.
The reforms have principally been aimed at preventing corruption at the Finance Ministry, the Taxation Directorate General, the Supreme Audit Agency, the Supreme Court, the National Police and the Attorney General’s Office.
The monthly take-home pay of a junior tax official, for example, rose to about Rp 20 million (US$2,200) after the start of bureaucratic reform in 2007.
However, as the graft cases involving tax officers Pargono Riyadi, Gayus Tambunan, Bahasyim Assafie and Dhana Widyatmika have shown, the raises did little to curb corruption.
Uchok Sky Khadafi of The Indonesian Forum for Budget Transparency (FITRA) said that bureaucratic reform has suffered a setback in recent years. “There’s nothing we can do about bureaucratic reform on civil servants,” Uchok said. “It is doomed.”
Sumber : http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/04/18/bureaucratic-reform-all-talk-and-no-action.html
