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ecause the Rp 255 trillion (US$19 billion) entrusted to regional administrations has hardly been spent, let'€™s, for the sake of the public, including the poor and needy, protect officials who fear the eagle eye of graft busters.

Such seems to be the pragmatic reasoning behind the government'€™s push for legal protection for officials to encourage better regional budget disbursement. But amid the grueling battle against graft, which has faced continued blows, including attempts to weaken the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), the planned regulation to encourage better budget spending could be further abused to steal the public'€™s money.

On Tuesday, Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform Minister Yuddy Chrisnandi said the ministry was drafting a government regulation to implement the law on government administration, to allow officials to use their discretion to spend regional budgets as long as it was for the public interest. He said if officials caused losses to the state in the process of tenders and procurements through mistakes that were not intended to enrich themselves and were caused by a lack of due diligence, the officials would only be asked to return the state losses and would not be prosecuted.

The government has a strong reason to be worried. Yuddy said up to Rp 255 trillion of regional funds is sitting idle in the accounts of regional administrations. The Regional Autonomy Watch (KPOD) reported that last year'€™s allocation of Rp 116 trillion for regional spending was never disbursed as there was no demand. Social Affairs Minister Khofifah Indar Parawansa has urged governors to spend their allocations on social assistance and identify what the problems were in disbursement.

Not only ministers, but regional heads are also afraid of being sent to jail. But their claims that their mistakes were unintentional would have to stand up in court, rather than be protected from the outset with a regulation. Lawyers for the former minister of state-owned enterprises, Dahlan Iskan, also the former director of the state-run electricity firm PLN, for instance, would argue that Dahlan had only the public interest in mind in providing electrical cars for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering in Bali without calling for tenders, or in the central power transformer project worth Rp 1.06 trillion.

What we are seeing now in the string of incumbent and former regional heads being indicted is likely the result of the officials trying to return favors to generous campaign contributors, with social funds being a relatively easy funding sector to abuse '€” apart from the procurement processes and allocations of various projects, with or without tenders.

Crucial measures are needed to improve the performance of the central and local governments. But more productive measures would include the tackling of the classic problem of late disbursements from the central government, which among other reasons is blamed on the poorly formulated proposals of local administrations.

Otherwise, merely rushing to provide discretion in the spending of such huge sums amid a war on corruption would be tantamount to bowing to blackmail by powerful executives and their supporters in legislative bodies.