Revealed! BPK Finds Excess Payment Of Health Worker Incentives Of Rp50 Million Per Person

Chairman of the Supreme BPK Firman Sampurna. (Photo: Screenshot of the BPK press conference)

JAKARTA - The Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) found an overpayment of incentives for health workers (nakes). The overpayment between January and August 2021. This occurred due to a technical error during the withdrawal of the health worker incentive proposal database from the health worker incentive application managed by the health human resources development and empowerment agency (PPSDM).

The chairman of BPK Agung Firman Sampurna said that the overpayment of health workers' incentives was due to the duplication of the recipient's name. Because, when changes were made to using a new system with an application, it turned out that there was one procedure that was not followed, namely data cleansing.

Agung said, the Ministry of Health skipped the step of data cleansing or data cleansing when rotating incentive payments from local government (Pemda)-based to application-based.

"There is duplication of intensive recipient data, and this data is used as the basis for payment of health workers incentives so that there is an overpayment for 8,961 health workers," he said in a virtual press conference, Monday, November 1.

Incentive payments through applications are needed to minimize deductions and other cases that often occur when they are distributed through the local government. Meanwhile, if through the application, health workers can immediately receive these incentives.

Furthermore, Agung said that the amount of the overpayment of the health worker incentives varied from hundreds of thousands to Rp50 million per health worker.

"This excess payment is recorded until January 1, 2021-19 August 2021 and varies between Rp178 thousand to Rp50 million," he explained.

Thus, the BPK recommends the Minister of Health through the Health PPSDM Agency to process the remaining overpayment of health workers incentives that still exist as of September 2021.

Agung said that the results of the BPK examination were part of an examination of the management of Indonesia's 2020 - 2021 Emergency Response to COVID-19 foreign loans at the Ministry of Health in the amount of USD 500 million from the World Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Furthermore, Agung explained that the purpose of the examination was to provide an assessment of the compliance of the program or activity in achieving the Disbursement Linked Indicator (DLI)/Disbursement Linked Result (DLR) of the foreign loan.

"The loan is given with several indicators, so after the indicators are achieved such as the formation of a national COVID-19 task force and so on, then the loan will be disbursed," he said.

According to Agus, from these various indicators, BPK conducted an inspection that found an overpayment of incentives for health workers due to a data cleaning process that was missed during the implementation of the incentive application.

However, Agung was reluctant to mention the total incentives received by the health workers. Because the inspection process has not been completed and is still being discussed further what the steps for solving it are. Even now, the total number continues to decrease because the Ministry of Health has responded quickly to make improvements to the data.

"Later, the results of the examination will be released and can be seen openly, along with the solutions we provide," he said.