T

he Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) has criticized the Jakarta administration for employing a regulation that prevents the public from scrutinizing some of its financial statements.

Febri Hendri, ICW’s division coordinator for public service monitoring, said that the regulation had allowed the administration to keep a number of financial documents from the public.

“Why would they keep them from the public? The measure will only make them susceptible to suspicions of corruption,” Febri told reporters at City Hall on Wednesday.

In Gubernatorial Decree No. 1971/2008 on exceptional information, the administration lists a number of document types categorized as exceptional and therefore inaccessible to the public.

The exceptional documents include financial reports, payment documents, expense documents, tender documents, contracts and procurement documents.

“If there is a mark-up on a certain procurement, the public won’t know because they cannot scrutinize the documents,” Febri said.

ICW representatives met with officials from the administration’s Legal Bureau on Wednesday morning. “We demand the administration revise the gubernatorial decree. All financial documents should be available to the public,” Febri said.

He said that the gubernatorial decree ran contrary to the Freedom of Information Law, which was enacted in 2008 and came into force in 2010.

The law stipulates that several types of information produced or maintained by local agencies must be released to the public periodically.

Further, information that endangers people’s livelihoods, the public order and information, such as agency rulings on an issue, must be made available upon request, according to the law said.

However, some information has been exempted from public disclosure, such as information that might obstruct law enforcement, hurt the protection of intellectual property rights, expose businesses to unhealthy competition, threaten state security, endanger Indonesia’s natural resources, damage foreign relations and or risk the exposure of information of a personal nature.

Last year, the ICW reported Jakarta Education Agency chief Taufik Yudi Mulyanto and the principals of five state junior high schools to the police for their reluctance to reveal information regarding the disbursement of education funds.

According to the ICW, the agency and schools refused to produce receipts for the funds they received from the central government under the School Operations Aid (BOS) and Education Operational Aid (BOP) programs.