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Study reveals funds handling issues in Islamic education
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Illustration. (Antara/Muhammad Iqbal) (Antara/Muhammad Iqbal)
Illustration. (Antara/Muhammad Iqbal)
The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) announced on Thursday that they have conducted a study on the disbursement the Islamic education budget, which is under control of the Religious Affairs Ministry.
The anti-corruption body stressed the need for the disbursement system to improve to avoid possible corrupt interference.
The study focused on two areas handled by the Islamic education directorate general (DJPI) in 2013-2014, the infrastructure and utility program (Sarpras) and funding for low-income students (BSM).
"[The study] was conducted because we need insights from a third party [the KPK] with the necessary capability, to ensure that funding gets channeled directly to the right recipients," Religious Affairs Minister Lukman Hakim Saifuddin said in a press conference on Thursday.
The study revealed nine problems within the ministry's infrastructure and utility program, three problems within the BSM program and four problems in other programs.
Infrastructure and utility program issues included an absence of good planning, a lack of good governance in its implementation, bad proposal verification, unaccountable use of donations for religious schools (Pesantren), poor tracking of recipients of donations, unclear labeling and organizing of donations to the Pesantren directorate, ineffective internal technical assistance for the program itself, ineffective funds management overall and poor management of the Sarpras funds.
Acting KPK commissioner Adnan Pandu Praja explained that the study was not a financial or performance audit, but a system audit. After the audit, said Adnan, the ministry had to plan out concrete actions aimed at creating a better system, complete with minimum targets to achieve in set time frames.
Islamic education director general Kamaruddin Amin said a huge amount of funding was involved in Islamic education programs, and that three ministries had received part of the funds, including the Religious Affairs Ministry.
Education received 20 percent of the 2015 state budget. Of that, the government allocated Rp 48.17 trillion to the Religious Affairs Ministry. That money, Kamaruddin said, was distributed across 34 provinces and 4,551 operational units.
Lukman said that the two most serious findings were the poor proposal verifications and the unaccountable use of donations. He acknowledged that the bad planning had been the case from the beginning of the program, in around 2013.
He was eyeing a new IT-based monitoring system, which would enable the ministry's staffers to directly access information regarding donation amounts and the disbursement process. (ags/bbn)
