Indonesia’s journey toward becoming a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is often framed in economic terms; stronger investment confidence, global credibility, and long-term growth. But our accession story is about something deeper. It is a governance test, one that asks whether our public institutions are strong enough to match our stated ambitions.
In 2024, the OECD Council adopted and delivered the Accession Roadmap to Indonesia, which provides an opportunity for the country to align itself against a more demanding set of standards for public financial management. Over the past decade, Indonesia has made real progress: integrated planning systems, digital budgeting platforms, and a track record of strong fiscal transparency.
But the OECD Roadmap’s central question is not whether such systems exist. It is about whether reforms are truly institutionalized. Whether evidence shapes budget decisions. Whether oversight influences outcomes. Whether public money works better for people.
The recent corruption scandal surrounding Indonesia’s Free Nutritious Meals program (Makan Bergizi Gratis) demonstrates why these questions matter.
When Transparency Isn't Enough
On June 3, 2026, Indonesia’s Attorney General’s Office arrested Dadan Hindayana—the recently dismissed head of the National Nutrition Agency—along with two deputies on corruption charges linked to the government’s flagship Free Nutritious Meals program.
The program was one of President Prabowo Subianto’s signature promises: providing meals to nearly 90 million schoolchildren and pregnant women while simultaneously supporting local farmers and improving nutrition outcomes. It was also one of the few programs explicitly protected from Indonesia’s 2025 austerity measures, even as ministries across government faced spending cuts.
Investigators allege that ineligible organizations were approved through manipulation of the agency’s verification system, enabling them to collect billions of rupiah in incentives. At the same time, reports emerged of food safety failures that left school children hospitalized.
What makes this notable is that the transparency systems worked as designed. Budget documents were published. Allocations were disclosed. Performance indicators existed. What failed was everything that comes after: the mechanisms that should have detected problems early, triggered corrective action, and ensured that a USD15 billion program serving 90 million people could not be manipulated without consequence.
The question is not whether information was available. The question is whether anyone was compelled to act on it.
A transparency leader with accountability gaps
Indonesia’s transparency record makes this failure all the more striking. This is not a country that hides its budgets. In the 2025 Open Budget Survey (OBS), conducted by the International Budget Partnership since 2006, Indonesia scored significantly above the global average of 45/100 on budget transparency.
The country has built integrated planning systems, digital platforms and monitoring frameworks that are recognized in both the Open Budget Survey and the OECD Accession Roadmap. But strong systems do not automatically produce accountability.
Indonesia no longer has a transparency problem. It has an accountability problem. A decade of investment in planning systems, digital platforms and monitoring frameworks has produced strong architecture, but architecture alone does not compel decisions, scrutinize spending or protect public money from misuse.
Three governance gaps explain why.
- The Missing Link: Evidence That Binds
One of the central expectations under the OECD Senior Budget Officials (SBO) Spending Better Framework is the ability to allocate and reallocate public resources based on evidence. Indonesia has conducted spending reviews since 2013, generating assessments of program efficiency and performance. Yet they remain largely advisory. Because they lack a “binding” mandate, the findings are often relegated to coordination forums rather than influencing actual budget ceilings or program cuts. The result is a system driven by incrementalism and political negotiation rather than value for money. This technical failure has real-world consequences. We see chronic underspending in vital sectors like education, while energy subsidies frequently exceed their limits. When fiscal pressure mounted in early 2025, the government opted for “across-the-board” expenditure tightening, a blunt instrument that ignored data-driven evidence and exempted politically sensitive flagship programs like the Free Nutritious Meals Program. In many OECD countries, spending reviews are embedded within the formal budget process and directly inform reprioritization decisions. They challenge baseline spending and create space for strategic trade-offs. Indonesia has the technical capacity to do the same. What remains is institutionalizing the practice, and ensuring no program is exempt from scrutiny. - The “Maze” of Fragmented Information
Indonesia’s challenge is no longer publishing information. It is ensuring that information is connected, understandable and consequential. Another critical “hard truth” is the audit gap. The supreme audit institution (BPK) does not audit a consolidated report; the financial report (LKPP) and the performance report (LAKIP) remain separate. This fragmentation ensures that “compliance” is checked while “performance” is ignored. Budget, spending, performance and audit information is currently dispersed across multiple platforms and institutions—APBN portals (budget disclosure), KRISNA (planning), SAKTI (execution), and BPK reports (audit). Citizens, parliamentarians, researchers, and civil society organizations often struggle to trace public funds from planning through implementation and audit. - Oversight in Form, Not Yet in Force
Indonesia’s oversight institutions possess important formal powers. The House of Representatives (DPR) reviews and approves budgets. The supreme audit institution (BPK) audits government accounts. Public participation mechanisms exist, particularly during planning processes. Yet influence remains limited.Without an independent Parliamentary Budget Office or equivalent fiscal institution capable of providing non-partisan analysis of fiscal assumptions, spending priorities and program performance, the DPR relies heavily on executive-generated information when scrutinizing the budget—a significant information asymmetry.In many OECD countries, independent Parliamentary Budget Offices help address this imbalance by providing non-partisan analysis of fiscal forecasts, spending proposals, medium-term fiscal risks and program performance. Such institutions strengthen legislative oversight by enabling Parliament to assess government policies based on independent evidence rather than executive reporting alone.Public participation faces similar constraints. Opportunities for engagement are concentrated in the early planning stages of the budget cycle, while formal channels during budget approval, execution and audit follow-up remain limited. Marginalized groups are rarely included systematically in these processes.
Oversight mechanisms exist, but they do not consistently shape budget decisions. Without scrutiny influencing decisions, accountability remains incomplete.
Five Reforms to Close the Gap
Panelists during the Public Dialogue, “Launch of the Open Budget Survey (OBS) 2025: The Role of Civil Society in Advancing Sectoral Reforms and Budget Governance in Indonesia’s OECD Accession Process” held in Jakarta on May 7, 2026.
From left to right: Dede Krishnadianty (International Budget Partnership Indonesia), Andi Ulya W (Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs), Meliana Lumbantoruan (Moderator, PWYP Indonesia), Rofyanto Kurniawan (Directorate General of Budget, Ministry of Finance), and Bona Tua P.P (International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development/INFID).
Strengthening alignment with OECD SBO standards, and improving accountability for citizens, requires movement on five practical fronts.
- Make spending reviews count. Rather than treating them as periodic exercises, Indonesia should embed spending reviews within the formal budget cycle and tie findings directly to concrete decisions: reallocation, program redesign, or termination. No program, including flagship ones, should be exempt from scrutiny.
- Build a unified public spending platform. Planning, budgeting, execution, performance and audit data currently sit in separate systems. Connecting them into a single interoperable platform would enable end-to-end traceability and make it far harder for gaps and inefficiencies to go undetected.
- Financial and performance accountability need to stop running on parallel tracks. Consolidating financial and performance reporting into one unified framework would allow audits to assess not just whether money was spent correctly, but whether it produced results.
- Establishing an independent Parliamentary Budget Office. A non-partisan Parliamentary Budget Office would equip Parliament with independent fiscal forecasting, policy costing, and spending analysis— rebalancing the information asymmetry with the executive and allowing for better-informed decisions on major expenditures.
- Move public participation beyond tokenism. Formalizing citizen engagement across the full budget cycle through parliamentary deliberations, implementation monitoring, and audit follow-up would create genuine accountability loops. Mechanisms should be designed specifically to reach marginalized communities, not just those already at the table.
Together, these five reforms would move Indonesia from a system that tracks spending to one that governs it.
Moving Beyond Compliance
The nutrition agency scandal should be seen not only as a crisis but as a warning—and an opportunity. It demonstrates why no program, regardless of its political importance, should be insulated from independent scrutiny.
OECD accession is not only about joining an economic club. Its lasting value lies in strengthening institutions so that public resources are allocated based on evidence, scrutinized through effective oversight and responsive to citizens’ needs.
Because ultimately, OECD accession is not just about growth. It is about building a budget system that consistently works for all Indonesians.
End note: This blog draws on IBP Indonesia’s policy brief, Closing the Accountability: Budget Governance Reforms for Indonesia’s OECD Accession. Read our full analysis here.
