SAMARINDA: East Kalimantan plans to slash spending on official travel by 20 to 30 percent next year and allot more funds to development, Governor Awang Farouk Ishak said on Thursday, Jakarta Globe reported news.
“The policy of reducing the expenditures for official trips is one step toward efficiency in the use of state funds,” the governor said. “This means that the budget for official trips, can now partly be used to fund development.”
The cut will apply to trips for officials in the provincial administration and also to legislators and civil servants working at the local legislative council, Awang added.
It is hoped that the move will help overcome public skepticism on the merits of trips taken by government officials.
“It should not be limited to cutting the budget allotment, but should also reduce the number of official trips taken that are not urgent,” the provincial leader said.
Awang said that every official making an official trip has to account for it when he or she returns.
“If the governor makes an official trip, he should submit an accountability report to the Home Affairs Ministry,” Awang said. “If the head of a regional office does it, then a report should submitted to the governor or the regional secretary.”
He said there are already regulations in place that ban overseas trips if there is no funding for them.
He said that all government institutions should, in the future, plan official trips in detail and decide if they are beneficial for the region’s development.
“Official visits should undergo thorough planning so that upon return, a follow-up program is already in place,” Awang said. Ineffective trips should be restricted, he added.
In 2013, East Kalimantan has a budget of Rp 13.34 trillion ($1.4 billion), up from this year’s Rp 10.6 trillion.
An official of the provincial administration who asked to not to be identified said that trip allowances are sources of additional revenue for most government officials.
“Every time one goes on a trip, he can get between Rp 2 million and Rp 3 million. There could be three to four trips in a month,” the official said. “Just do the math. Nowadays it is much harder to play around with [development]projects, which are now strictly supervised.”
The official said that he would accept whatever decision was made.
Balikpapan city authorities are also cutting down on official trips.
Deputy Mayor Heru Bambang said that the East Kalimantan city has decided to cut the official trip budget allotment by 20 percent next year. He said that trips would not leading to significant benefits or changes would be eliminated.
The city will only provide a small sum for travel to city offices while the bulk of the allotment will go to the city secretariat, to manage which trips should be prioritized.
Meanwhile, national opposition lawmaker Eva Kusuma Sundari on Wednesday warned that it was hard for the House of Representatives to detect a misuse of funds in government funding allotments, because the proposals being assessed by the legislature lack detail.
“There is a problem in the format of the state draft budget discussed at the House of Representatives, because it is usually in a general format only,” the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) official said.
She said applications for government expenditure are limited in the details they seek. Among the types of applications that are inadequate are those for routine expenditure, the provision of goods and services, capital expenditure, subsidies, rent and social assistance.
National lawmakers have themselves previous come under scrutiny for overseas trips with limited apparent public benefit.