Social Minister Claims Potential State Losses In Social Assistance Distribution Can Be Rescued

Minister of Social Affairs (Mensos) Tri Rismaharini. (doc. Setkab)

JAKARTA - Minister of Social Affairs (Mensos) Tri Rismaharini claims that the potential loss to the state in the distribution of social assistance (bansos) of more than Rp523 billion per month can be saved.

In a statement Wednesday, September 6, the Minister of Social Affairs said that the rescue was through the service of social assistance recipients who were carried out with the local government as many as 2,284,992 beneficiary families (KPM).

The Minister of Social Affairs said that his party together with the local government had also succeeded in improving 41,377,528 data and 21,072,271 new proposal data had been received. With the number of recipients of social assistance as many as 15,294,921 people and those proposed to enter DTKS, there were 4,473,332 people.

The Minister of Social Affairs also conveyed that the potential loss to the state of social assistance disbursement of Rp140 billion per month can be saved together with the cooperation of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), the Directorate General of Dukcapil of the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Directorate General of AHU of the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, the State Civil Service Agency and BPJS Employment.

Where as many as 493,137 social assistance recipients whose salaries are above the district/city minimum wage (UMK), 23,879 ASN and 13,369 data registered with the Directorate General of AHU have been returned to the Region for verification.

The Minister of Social Affairs revealed that since taking office he has received a lot of input from the BPK, BPKP and other institutions related to efforts to clean the Integrated Social Welfare Data (DTKS), so that in August 2023 68.211.528 data has been put to sleep or off operations.

"Since I first served as Minister of Social Affairs, I received many love letters from BPK, BPKP or other institutions containing our data with no integrity. Then there is also a problem of transparency and regulation of social assistance data. From there we are determined to make improvements," said Social Minister Risma.

In addition, the Minister of Social Affairs considers that data updates for two years (according to the law), or even once every six months are considered very slow. Because population data changes quickly, whether someone dies, changes domicile, baby is born, and so on.

Therefore, the Minister of Social Affairs proposes an update of data once a month. "So, in 2021, we have tried to evaluate it every six months, the data has not updated. That's why the deviation is too high if we update it every two years. The risk of data inaccuracies is very high. Finally, I propose to update the data every month," said the Minister of Social Affairs.

The Minister of Social Affairs also mentioned the important role of local governments, in accordance with Law No. 13 of 2011, where the Minister of Social Affairs is only authorized to determine, and not to change or propose data. The law provides a mandate, data is proposed from the village/kelurahan level and increases in stages.

That determination is the basis for the government or local government to provide assistance and/or empowerment. This is because the Minister of Social Affairs is not authorized to change data.

The Minister of Social Affairs also added that the Ministry of Social Affairs has provided a social security application in which there is a rebuttal proposal feature. With this objection proposal feature, the public can submit data independently. This rebuttal feature was also present because there were many complaints to the Minister of Social Affairs regarding the wrong target for social assistance.

"Quite a lot of people feel that social assistance is not right on target. The poor cannot, the rich can. With this feature, people can apply for DTKS themselves and we will check their feasibility," said the Minister of Social Affairs.