Corruption Worsens Quality of Infrastructure

TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta:The high levels of corruption in Indonesia will result in infrastructure of bad quality. The Monitoring Committee on Regional Autonomy Implementation (KPPOD) observed that corruption caused budget increases not followed up by improvements in infrastructure quality."As we all know, business players are impeded by infrastructure in developing their business," said KPPOD researcher, Ratnawati Muyanto, at a public discussion on September 17.Ratnawati said that the higher the corruption in an institution or government agency, the more increasingly wasteful the government spending on the infrastructure sector. Based on their research, corruption is most prevalent in the procurement of goods and services sectors.According to Ratnawati, there are two models that show the effects of corruption on the quality of road infrastructure in the regions. In the first model, corruption will tend to increase the budget of the local government to spend on infrastructure projects because project contractors inflate the costs in their business calculations."There is a conspiracy, for example, during construction, the materials used are of poorer quality than what it should be," he said.In the second model, according to her, corruption can lead to lower revenues for the state or the region. This happens in the embezzlement cases of state or regional revenues such as corruption of local taxes, fraud of levies, or misuse of funds transferred by the central government. She concludes that budgets are corrupted due to weak oversight on bureaucracy administration. "The lack of participation by the civil society groups also has a major impact," he said.ROSALINA