GAB is pleased to welcome back Sofie Arjon Schütte, Senior Advisor at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, to contribute today’s guest post:

Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission, known by its acronym KPK, was established during Indonesia’s reformation period in the early 2000s, and quickly became one of the world’s most powerful and independent anticorruption commissions. When the KPK began operations in 2004, a government regulation granted the agency substantial autonomy in its human resources management system, which the KPK used to ensure the integrity and competence of its staff. This control over personnel is considered good practice by international standards for anticorruption agencies, especially in environments where the existing state apparatus, and in particular law enforcement, is part of the corruption problem. And in Indonesia’s case, the KPK’s success in ensuring a competent and honest staff has been crucial to the agency’s track record of success—a track record that includes bringing more than 700 cases, the large majority of which resulted in guilty verdicts against members of Indonesia’s national and regional political elite.

But the KPK’s threat to vested interests has provoked strong resistance. This resistance has taken many forms, from judicial hostility, orchestrated demonstrations and threats, personal attacks on members of the organization, stalling the agency’s budget, and attempts to curtail its authority and autonomy through other legislative changes. The most devastating development was a new KPK Law, adopted in 2019, that was pushed through the legislature in rapid time without public input. This law effectively stripped the KPK of autonomy in important investigative functions and in its human resources management (here and here). Under the law, by September 2021 the KPK is to be integrated into the state apparatus, and its employees must become regular civil servants.

Allegedly as part of this process of integrating KPK employees into the regular civil service, the government recently required all KPK officials to take a specially concocted “national vision exam.” To be clear, neither the 2019 KPK Law nor its implementing regulations explicitly require such a test, which differs from the standard civil service entrance exam that all civil servants must take. Rather, this special test was developed by the National Civil Service Agency in collaboration with the Indonesian Armed Forces and Intelligence Service specifically to determine which KPK officers were radical and lacked neutrality and integrity and therefore presumably unfit for future civil service.

Seventy-five KPK employees failed this special exam. That may not seem like a big deal, both because 75 people amounts to less than 6% of the KPK’s current staff of over 1,300 employees, and because it might seem that failing a civil service exam is a reasonable ground for dismissal. But as the names of those who failed the test, and more details about the questions and the process, were made public, many critics have raised legitimate concerns. Indeed, even before the test was administered, the KPK employees’ union (which, by the way, will cease to exist after the conversion of the KPK into a regular civil service agency) warned that such a test could be misused to legitimize the marginalization or dismissal of KPK officers that handle strategic cases or hold strategic positions in the agency. And now that the results have come out, there are reasons to believe these fears were well-founded.