The COVID-19 Task Force: The Government Upholds The Transparency Of The Pandemic Management Budget

Spokesperson for the Task Force (Task Force) Handling COVID-19 Wiku Adisasmito

JAKARTA - Spokesperson for the Task Force Handling COVID-19 Wiku Adisasmito emphasized that the government is open and transparent, regarding the use of the budget for handling COVID-19.

This was conveyed in response to the issue of problems in the procurement of test kits at the beginning of the pandemic.

"I need to emphasize that the government in principle upholds transparency and openness in the use of the budget allocated for the COVID-19 handling program", Wiku said in a press conference broadcast on the Presidential Secretariat YouTube channel, Tuesday, March 16.

This transparency and openness, he continued, was proven by the involvement of the supervisory team from two different institutions, namely the Financial and Development Supervisory Agency (BPKP) and the Goods and Services Procurement Policy Institute (LKPP).

"Thus, the procurement of goods and services can be carried out in an open and accountable manner", he said.

As previously reported, the procurement of a COVID-19 real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test kit in Indonesia at the start of the pandemic was suspected of having a problem. Dozens of hospitals returned hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 test kits to the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) because they could not be used.

In the investigation of Tempo Magazine together with Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) and friends, they found that there were allegations of state losses in the return of hundreds of thousands of RT-PCR COVID-19 test kits. The amount is around IDR 170 billion. This is due to the inaccurate procurement of test kits.

Responding to this, Suryopratomo, a member of the Task Force for Handling COVID-19, admitted that all countries, in the early days of the pandemic, were still faced with ignorance of good handling of COVID-19.

"In the situation in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, international agencies, be it the World Health Organization (WHO) or UNICEF, did not have a standard guideline for handling COVID-19. All did it by trial and error", said Suryopratomo in the BNPB YouTube broadcast. Indonesia, Monday, March 15th.

At the start of the pandemic, Suryopratomo admitted that his party was faced with a tense situation. Health workers began to fall due to handling COVID-19. The only way is to procure PCR test kits.

Unfortunately, at that time, there were only two countries that could produce PCR test reagents, namely China and Korea. The Task Force, which at that time was called the Task Force for the Acceleration of Handling COVID-19, had to procure a PCR test.

"Now there is a lot of discussions as if the task force carried out the procurement of PCR tests carelessly and did not conduct studies", said Suryopratomo.

"I said, what the Task Force team was doing was oriented towards how as soon as possible we could control the transmission, as soon as possible to find out which members of the community were infected, so then isolation or quarantine could be carried out so as not to infect others", he continued.