Indonesia Lifts Moratorium on Hiring Civil Servants

Jakarta Globe

The Indonesian government announced on
Monday that the moratorium on hiring new civil servants was
lifted at the end of December, 16 months after it was instituted, but that stringent
recruitment policies would be maintained.
 

Vice President Boediono said that the
essence of the moratorium would still be continued — zero growth
policy.

“The efforts to improve the
employment policy and system will be intensified by, among others,
adjusting the needs analysis for civil servants and the budget
cycle,” Boediono said in a press release obtained by Jakarta Globe.

The moratorium, which began in
September 2011, was aimed at stemming the ballooning cost of running
the bureaucracy, organizational restructuring and rightsizing, civil
servant redistribution, transparent recruitment and improving civil
servant professionalism.

According to data from the Civil Service
Administration Board (BAKN), Indonesia had 4.64
million civil servants in October 2011.

As of the end of 2012, Indonesia had
4.46 million civil servants, or 1.9 percent of the country’s 241 million
population.

In the future, Boediono said there would be three
requirements before hiring new employees. The first is for ministries
and other government institutions to have a five-year human resource
plan, backed by position analysis and work-load analysis, that is in line with the civil servant redistribution plan. Government
offices should also conduct an open, fair, clean, efficient and
accountable recruitment process.

Second, only government
offices that spend less than 50 percent of their total budgets for
employees would be allowed to hire.

Third, recruitment can
only be done after receiving approval from the National Committee
for Bureaucracy Reform, which is chaired by Boediono.

Azwar
Abubakar, the minister for administrative reform, has said the government
had a budget of Rp 212 trillion for civil servant salaries in 2012
and planned to allocate Rp 241 trillion in 2013′s budget, which
accounts for 15 percent of the total budget spending.

According
to the Indonesian Forum for Budget Transparency (FITRA), the Rp 241
trillion budget was only for civil servants working for the central
government. Another Rp 306 trillion would be used to pay the salaries of
civil servants working in regional administrations throughout the
country.