Remuneration Cannot Fully Prevent Corruption: Ministry

Bandung, West Java (Antara) - Remuneration provided for civil servants as part of bureaucratic reforms cannot fully guarantee that it will reduce misappropriation of state money, a senior official said. "We cannot guarantee that people will no longer steal state money if they have been provided with remuneration," Secretary General of the Ministry of Finance Ki Agus Badaruddin said here on Saturday night. Ki Agus said that the government had provided remuneration for civil servants at the finance ministry so that they would live a decent life and carry out their tasks and authorities with full responsibilities. "If they are expected to be clean, state apparatuses must receive compensation in the form of remuneration so that they would live a decent life," he said. However, if they have received incentives but they still abuse their authorities that meant they actually had materialistic and corrupt mentalities. "If they are still committing corruption (after being provided with remuneration), this means that they have been accustomed to doing it. It is impossible for us to fight corruption with remuneration because no matter how much we give them they will remain corrupt because money they get from corruption is more than the one they receive from remuneration," the finance ministry secretary general said. Ki Agus said that the finance ministry still had many clean officials and abode by regulations so that it would be inappropriate to generalize all the ministry's employees as corrupt officials. "Many of them still maintain their philosophy of life that money is not above all. These people must have enough salaries. If they do not receive remuneration, they could not work well," he said. He said that the ministry of finance had always tried to improve its recruitment system and made evaluations in order to ensure the reforms process would proceed and misappropriations would be reduced. "If we stop making corrections it would ruin the nation. We should not bow to a handful of persons who committed a crime," noted Ki Agus. The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has named two tax officials as suspects for receiving bribes in a yet another tax evasion case. KPK spokesperson Johan Budi said on Thursday that the two taxmen, Mohamad Dian Irwan Nuqishira and Eko Darmayanto, were suspected of receiving S$300,000 (US$240,558) in cash from steel company PT The Master Steel.(*)