“Regulations that protect the public interest are important but each time a new regulation is made, there will always be a chance for corrupt transactions to occur,” he said in his remarks during the opening ceremony of the 2017 International Anticorruption Day celebration in Jakarta on Monday.

Jokowi said the issuance of licenses required by regulations had often become transaction targets for local administrations and related stakeholders.

“Each license becomes a transaction object. We should not let this happen," he said.

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Since 2015, the government has been attempting to abolish at least 42,000 regional administration regulations deemed as unnecessarily burdensome for businesses. However, in June, the Constitutional Court revoked the central government's authority to abolish regional administration regulations

“I will make a competition. I will give a reward to the entity that can cut the most rules,” Jokowi said.

The central government will soon create an integrated licensing system that will connect the central and regional administrations, Jokowi said.

With the new system, he said, the central government could trace the bottlenecks in the licensing process. As of August, 531 out of 538 regencies and municipalities have implemented the one-stop integrated service system (PTSP). However, only 405 of them have applied standard operating procedures and only 200 have included all of their licenses in the PTSP.

Jokowi pointed out that most corruption cases taking place in Indonesia involved bribery of government officials. Since 2004, 12 governors, two Bank Indonesia (BI) officials and 64 regents and mayors have been prosecuted for corruption. (ebf)

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