Vincent Lingga , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta Tue, 04/06/2010 9:28 AM Commentary
Had it not been for a whistle-blower, former National Police chief detective Comr.Gen Susno Duadji, junior tax auditor Gayus Tambunan, several police officers, state attorneys and judges would today be relishing their shares of the US$2.8 million that they allegedly stole from taxpayers.
The public, and notably Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, was certainly burned by the painful fact that the sweeping reform at the Directorate General of Taxation, which has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, seemed to have failed to set up an early warning system against corrupt officials.
Mulyani, who is locked in a battle against time to regain the public’s confidence in the reform she has led since mid-2007, has moved fast to replace all staff members in Gayus’ department and has ordered a re-examination of the annual tax returns of 15,000 tax officials for the past three years and a probe into their bank accounts.
The problem is simply this - how could Gayus, a junior tax official with a monthly paycheck of just Rp 12 million ($1,200), have had $2.8 million in his bank accounts and lived so ostentatiously — owning hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property and cars — without raising any eyebrows among his supervisors and colleagues?
Worse, Gayus had never experienced any problems with his annual tax returns. So we must assume he always understated his true income.
Learning a lesson from the actions of “renegade” police general Susno, we think Mulyani should strengthen the internal control mechanism at the Directorate General of Taxation by setting up hotlines for whistle-blowers and members of the general public to report on suspicious behavior of public officials such as tax officers.
Most multinational companies or organizations with worldwide operations, despite operating independent internal control units, set up whistle-blower hotlines as part of an early warning system to keep tabs on their employees’ compliance with laws and ethical standards.
For example, one of the world’s largest oil companies, Royal Dutch Shell, established what it calls the Shell Global Helpline and included on its website manuals that inform stakeholders (suppliers, officials of host government, employees, shareholders and the general public) around the world how to file anonymous reports on the conduct of Shell employees.
Mulyani herself has often complained about the extreme difficulty in finding tax officials with completely clean records or without skeletons in their closets for supervisory roles because of the extreme tolerance for corruption prevalent during the pre-reform era.
But again, as Gayus’ case clearly shows, even in this reform era tax officials remain hesitant to report colleagues either because they too are involved in corruption or they have no faith in their senior officials to follow up on the report.
The most important thing that must be done to ensure the effectiveness of whistle-blower lines is to protect the identity of the tipsters and to act quickly and firmly to follow up on reports of wrongdoing, unethical behavior or the excessively luxurious lifestyles of tax officials.
These factors were outstandingly absent in similar hotlines introduced by several ministries in the past, even under Soeharto’s authoritarian rule that ended in 1998.
Tipsters should be protected from retaliation and any legal consequences even if their reports are not accurate or false as long as they have made their report in good faith and without malicious intent.
A whistle-blower system could consist of a telephone line or a secure website. Obviously, state-owned telecommunications company PT Telkom could easily come up with such IT solutions.
Of course, for the sake of credibility, a whistle-blower hotline should be operated by an independent party, although follow-ups would necessitate an inquiry or investigation carried out in cooperation with tax officials. And even in such investigations, the identity of the whistle-blower should be shared strictly on a need-to-know basis.
Shell, for example, outsourced the creation and maintenance of its global whistle-blower helpline to Global Compliance.
“I think for Indonesia, the President’s Judicial Anti-Corruption Taskforce could be the most qualified to operate such a whistle-blower line, given the integrity of its personnel [leaders],” PT Shell Indonesia’s chief executive officer Darwin Silalahi said.
Such hotlines, Darwin advised, should not be restricted to issues concerning the Directorate General of Taxation but should also envelope corruption in customs and excise tax and land-title registration as well as law enforcement, involving police, prosecutors and judges.
There is certainly a risk that such a hotline would initially be flooded by false reports or information called in to maliciously attack particular officials, but such a risk is still worth taking because the future of the drive to reform the country’s bureaucracy is now at stake.
Besides, the whistle-blower taskforce surely would not be so easily fooled by such false reports or slander.
Look at how even the Corruption Eradication Commission owes many of its high-profile catches to tips from members of the general public.
