KPK chairman Firli Bahuri said at a press briefing on Monday that the antigraft body had improved its score in a performance assessment carried out by its supervisory board in the first half of the year compared to the same period last year.

This year, the commission scored 93.65 in the assessment, up from last year’s 92.06. Firli did not, however, provide details about the assessment, such as the indicators used to evaluate the antigraft body’s performance.

He hailed the arrest of suspended Papua Governor Lukas Enembe as one of antigraft body’s big successes in the first half of the year.

“There’s an opinion that the KPK hasn’t been working to catch big fish. Of course we have,” Firli said during a Monday press briefing. “Lukas Enembe hasn’t been ensnared by the law for about 10 years, but we’ve managed to capture him now.”

The KPK had also arrested more people in total this year, Firli noted. Between January and June, it had detained 89 people on graft charges, up from 68 last year.

It appears that the KPK has also shifted its strategy away from sting operations, with three such operations in the first half of the year, down from six in the same period last year.

The commission recovered Rp 166 billion (US$10.8 million) in state losses in the first half of the year, about half the amount it managed to in the same period last year.

KPK officials also saw an uptick in reports of illicit gifts received by state officials. The Corruption Law requires state officials to report potentially unlawful gifts to the KPK within 30 days of accepting them. Otherwise, the official may be prosecuted for accepting bribes.

In the first half of this year, the KPK received 2,039 reports of potentially unlawful gifts, increasing from 1,819 in the same period last year. The value of the reported gifts decreased from Rp 1.8 billion in 2022 to Rp 1.3 billion this year.

“The achievement target for graft prevention is how many people are aware of reporting gratuities to us,” KPK deputy chairman Nurul Ghufron said.

Slew of scandals

Despite some improvements, the KPK has been embroiled in a number of controversies in the past six months.

One KPK worker was found in late June to have embezzled hundreds of millions of rupiah from the agency’s travel budget, costing the state an estimated Rp 550 million.

The antigraft body also found that dozens of its employees had accepted bribes totaling Rp 4 billion between December 2021 and March 2022, related to visitations at KPK detention centers.

Another employee was found guilty by the body’s supervisory board of harassing the wife of a KPK detainee. The KPK punished the employee by cutting his pay.

The antigraft body’s leaders, too, have been in hot water recently. One controversy was over the contentious dismissal of Brig. Gen. Endar Priantoro, a National Police officer who was stationed as KPK investigations director. Following the dismissal, activists called for Firli and his deputy chairmen to step down.

Despite Firli’s claims of success, Zaenur Rohman of the Gadjah Mada University Center for Anticorruption Studies (Pukat UGM) said the KPK’s performance had, in fact, declined.

“If we’re looking at the amount of money recovered from the graft cases, there’s no improvement in the KPK’s performance. The KPK was established to prosecute big cases on the first place,” Zaenur noted.

Firli’s leadership of the KPK has been criticized since he took office in 2019, including for a widely criticized civic knowledge test that resulted in the dismissal of dozens of KPK employees in 2021.

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