The pandemic, however, has prevented Tinto from taking on his usual side jobs, leaving him with only the Rp 2 million (US$138.32) per month he earns as an honorarium-based worker – barely enough to feed his family of five.

He immediately signed his son up for a National Health Insurance (JKN) plan, which is run by the Healthcare and Social Security Agency (BPJS Kesehatan). The South Tangerang administration later included his son as a recipient of contribution assistance (PBI) for low-income patients whose JKN premiums are fully paid by the central government or local administrations.

Upon rejection from six different hospitals, Tinto discovered that his son had extrapulmonary tuberculosis, not COVID-19. By then, in late May, the boy required surgery to remove the lump, which Tinto believed would have been unnecessary had he been diagnosed earlier.

"I didn't have much money with the pandemic and all. So, I used the JKN," he said.

Just four days before the surgery in early June, the hospital told him that his son was no longer registered as a PBI recipient. Tinto, appalled and confused, rushed to reactivate his son's JKN plan and managed to do so in time for the surgery.

"My wife and I think it's alright to pay the premiums [Rp 25,500 per month]. The service is already bad even with us paying, never mind if we don't pay. By paying we can also help cover those in need given its cross-subsidy system," he said.

South Tangerang Health Agency acting head Deden Deni said that since May his office had been evaluating its 430,000 PBI participants whose JKN premiums the city had been paying since late 2018, in order to make sure only the poor would receive the PBI assistance.

The 430,000 South Tangerang residents were included in the PBI scheme in a hasty city decision in 2018 after it promised to BPJS Kesehatan to reach out to more people, who at that time, had not joined the JKN program, by paying for their premiums regardless of their economic status.

But with the government's decision to raise premiums, effective on July 1, South Tangerang decided to remove some 310,000 people, including Tinto’s son, from the list of PBI recipients, with Deden saying the list would be updated regularly.

"[In 2018] we used basic data [...]. Time-wise, it was not possible to [filter] our people because we had the obligation to cover all of our people without sorting them into the needy and those who could afford [to pay premiums]," Deden said.

Tinto is just one among many victims of Indonesia's data discrepancies that have hampered aid to the poor and led to potential state losses and a potential loss of income for the deficit-stricken BPJS.

Data in May showed that the central government paid the premiums of 95 million PBI participants, while local administrations paid for 34 million policyholders.

In a February hearing with lawmakers, Social Affairs Minister Juliari Batubara revealed that some 30 million of the 98.6 million PBI participants, however, were not registered on the ministry's Integrated Data of Social Welfare (DTKS).

The DTKS collects socioeconomic and demographic information on the population's bottom 40 percent in terms of welfare and has been used by the government as a basis to determine PBI recipients, although some local administrations have not updated their information since 2015. This means that there could be PBI participants who are actually not eligible for such assistance, experts say.

In the same hearing, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati cited a Development Finance Comptroller (BPKP) audit report on the BPJS that found membership problems with 27.44 million JKN participants, ranging from double-registered citizenship identification numbers (NIKs) and NIKs containing letters instead of only numbers to names of deceased persons.

In late 2019, a Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) study on the PBI database found that 484,247 participants had actually died and 1.04 million participants had double-registered NIKs. This indicated poor data management and could cause state losses, KPK deputy for graft prevention Pahala Nainggolan told The Jakarta Post.

Lawmakers had told the government to clean up the PBI data first before raising the JKN premiums. But the government, in a bid to reduce the BPJS deficit, insisted on issuing a presidential regulation to increase premiums in early May, roughly two months after the Supreme Court annulled an earlier, similar regulation.

In a June hearing with House Commission IX overseeing health care, Coordinating Human Development and Culture Minister Muhadjir Effendy said data collection was a "very complicated problem".

Given the complexity of the data, the central government has been relying on updates from local administrations, many of which still had not performed their task, Muhadjir said. The government was considering rewards and punishments to encourage local administrations to speed up their updating of the data, he said.

"The data is from [local administrations]. If [local administrations] did not collect and update their data, then the submitted data would be rubbish and the output would be rubbish. It would be garbage in, garbage out," he said.

Social Affairs Ministry data and information center head Said Mirza Pahlevi told the Post that the ministry still had to clean up data on 25 million PBI participants, adding that some 90 cities and regencies had never updated their data.

Timboel Siregar from watchdog BPJS Watch urged the government to improve data management to ensure more room for poor people eligible for the assistance, especially now that more people are falling into poverty as a result of the pandemic.

"There should be two-way data collection. The government should inform the people that those who are poor can report themselves to local social affairs agencies to be verified and registered as PBI participants," he said.