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Thou shalt not commit adultery, govt reminds civil servants
The government appears to be gearing up to clamp down on a rise in the divorce rate and reported extramarital affairs that has been plaguing the civil service, like a never-ending sinetron (soap opera) series gasping for its final episode.
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Teachers are sworn in as civil servants at a ceremony on July 5, 2023 at Tegar Beriman Field in Cibinong, Bogor regency, West Java. (Antara/Yulius Satria Wijaya)
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caveat of the job security, better-than-average benefits and retirement accorded to civil servants is that they must be "outstanding examples for the public" in both their professional and personal lives, as stipulated in a 1990 government regulation that remains in effect today.
So when the Civil Service Commission (KASN) received hundreds of reports concerning extramarital affairs and divorce among civil servants in the past few years, the commission scrambled to find solutions.
"An extramarital affair is poison for civil servants. It can destroy their moral integrity, their job performance, their reputation, their families and their careers. It can also harm public perception of the institution they work for," KASN head Agus Pramusinto said during a webinar on Wednesday.
Titled “Extramarital Affairs of Civil Servants: Forbidden Love, Rising Problems”, the webinar was part of KASN’s efforts to educate government employees about the harms of cheating on their spouses.
As of Friday, almost 300,000 people had tuned in to the webinar.
Agus said that between 2020 and 2023, KASN had received 172 reports of extramarital affairs that accounted for 25 percent of all reported ethics violations committed by public servants.
"That [figure] included affairs between government employees or between civil servants and [members of] the general public. However, the number would be much bigger if we included reports from the monitoring agencies at each government institution, including at the regional level," Agus said, without specifying the overall total.
