•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   

As a House of Representatives committee on Wednesday quizzed the General Elections Commission over the voters lists used in this year’s elections, the commission was preparing to answer an unrelated set of questions related to how it spent its budget.

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) says the elections body, or KPU, overspent on information technology for electronic vote counting.

KPU chairman Abdul Hafiz Anshary said he had ordered commission officials responsible for IT procurement to look into the allegations. “I have asked the KPU secretary general to investigate this so we can prepare our explanation for the KPK,” Hafiz said.

The KPU drew the attention of the anticorruption agency after the failure of its billion-rupiah electronic vote-counting system for April’s legislative elections.

The commission purchased a special program, called Intelligent Character Recognition, that was supposed to scan ballots at the local level and send the results back to the central office in Jakarta over the Internet.

However, less than 20 percent of ballots were counted by the system and posted on the KPU’s Web site.

The failure was variously blamed on computer operators’ lack of experience, scanner incompatibility with the software and faulty software.

On Tuesday, KPK official Lambok Hutauruk said his organization had detected indications of overspending on the IT equipment by the KPU.

This will not be the first time that members of the elections body have been summoned by the KPK over the IT purchases.

“We already explained the procurement process to the KPK’s director of gratuities when they summoned us previously,” Hafiz said.

KPK officials have visited regional offices of the elections commission in several provinces as part of the investigation.

Abdul Aziz, a member of KPU who helped oversee the procurement process, said on Wednesday that he had not been informed by the KPK about the allegations of overspending.

Aziz questioned why the KPK had not met directly with the KPU about the issue, and instead had gone through the media to put out the allegations.

“It is ridiculous that they chose to inform the media instead of informing us about the allegations,” he said.

Aziz refused to bear any responsibility for the procurement of the IT equipment. “Concerning budgets, it is the responsibility of the secretary general,” he said. Camelia Pasandaran