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Government paid 97,000 ‘fictitious’ workers for years, agency reveals
Irregularities in the public records of the civil service apparatus was unearthed in 2014 after the National Civil Service Agency (BKN) initiated an electronic self-census of public service workers.
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The Jakarta administration's civil servants attend a ceremony in Jakarta in this undated image. (Tempo.co/-)
F
or more than a decade, the government had been paying salaries and pensions to nearly 100,000 “fictitious” civil servants (PNS), the head of the National Civil Service Agency (BKN) revealed this week, exposing a gap in Indonesia’s recent push for digital transformation.
This discrepancy in the public records was unearthed in 2014, when the BKN ordered an electronic self-census of the civil service apparatus, agency head Bima Haria Wibisana said on Monday.
“[The census found] that nearly 100,000 data points – 97,000 to be precise – were a mystery. Salaries were paid and pension contributions were provided, but these ‘people’ did not exist,” he said in a video broadcast on the BKN’s YouTube account.
Bima conceded that public records on the civil service had only been updated twice since the country’s independence in 1945, with the first occurring in 2002. At the time, data was collected manually and processed offline, which made it a time-consuming and costly endeavor.
Read also: Minister to cut number of unproductive civil servants during work-from-home period
“This drawn-out and expensive process did not produce the perfect database. There are still many things that need to be updated and completed. In fact, there is still a lot of fake data,” he said.
In the update beginning in 2014, which brought the entire process online, the BKN managed to find data on 97,000 “fake” public workers going back to the 2002 census. Bima claims that the issue has since been resolved.
