T

he highly publicized draft 2015 city budget dispute has been the talk of the town for weeks since the City Council and Governor Basuki '€œAhok'€ Tjahaja Purnama launched attacks against one another, both refusing to back down.

Centered around the dispute regarding is electronic budgeting system, popularly known as e-budgeting, which was first introduced in the Jakarta administration in 2013 but was not fully implemented until this year. The system has been up and running in East Java'€™s Surabaya city administration since 2012.

The Jakarta administration planned to rollout the system in 2014, but that plan was delayed to develop a more complete and detailed budgeting system.

Ahok acknowledged he deliberately forced the implementation of e-budgeting in order to put a stop to corruption, which is usually done by both city officials in cooperation with city councilors. E-budgeting, Ahok said, is an online software that only selected officials can access in order to make changes.

'€œEach log-in and all edits are recorded, so we know exactly who did what, when and where. This way, not just anyone can make changes to the draft budget,'€ Ahok told reporters at City Hall in Central Jakarta on Friday.

Jakarta Development Planning Board (Bappeda) Tuti Kusumawati said that the software could only be accessed by those who were owned a password: one officer in each working unit owns a password and is responsible for inputting budget data.

'€œPak Ahok issues approval letters for responsible officials in each working unit. The password is different for each person, so we can track log-ins,'€ Tuti told The Jakarta Post in City Hall recently.

After agreements are reached in budget deliberations between the executive and legislative bodies, she said, the responsible officials input the programs, projects and figures in the system. Tuty went on to say that Ahok himself also owned a password so that he could regularly check the draft budget.

Jakarta Financial Management Board (BPKD) Heru Budi Hartono said before the e-budgeting system, the city drafted city budgets manually using Microsoft Excel, where changes were hard to attribute to a single individual. Heru added that the main server for the e-budgeting system was housed at the BPKD.

Ahok said he suspected that City Council was fussing over the 2015 draft budget in response to his ruthless effort to implement e-budgeting, which disadvantaged those accustomed to corruption.

'€œBefore e-budgeting, corruptors could easily make changes to the budget, and it'€™s difficult for us to trace where the changes where and from whom they came from. As a result, we overlooked many dubious allocations,'€ he said. Ahok added that the system was developed by systems information experts from Surabaya.

The councilors, Ahok suspected, were resistant to the e-budgeting system. For example, Deputy Council Speaker Abraham '€œLulung'€ Lunggana of the United Development Party (PPP) said that e-budgeting system '€œshould not be the main reference for budgeting'€.

'€œE-budgeting is only an alternative to the manual budgeting system and shouldn'€™t be a main reference when budgeting. The City Council has budgeting rights which the city administration must consider during drafting and deliberation,'€ he has said.

Ahok accused councilors of manually tampering with the budget after the 2015 draft budget was approved by a plenary session at the City Council building on Jan. 27.

Ahok sent the draft budget using the e-budgeting format to the Home Ministry, while City Council later sent its own version, calling the one that Ahok sent '€œillegal'€ because it was not what they approved.

Ahok reported the irregularities to the Corruption Eradication Commission on Friday, bringing evidence of alleged mark-ups in the 2015 draft budget totaling Rp 12.1 trillion.