Speedy Pension Payments A Priority, SBY Says

SBY PRESIDENCY

Citing a flood of complaints, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ordered his ministers on Monday to cut the red tape holding up the release of pension payments to hundreds of retired civil servants.

At a cabinet meeting, the president said the lengthy two-stage process for approving new pension payments needed to be reduced drastically.

“I want it to be cut from four months [for the first stage] to one month, and from three months [for the second stage] to a week,” he said.

“I don’t want to receive any more complaints about the late issuance of pension payments.”

With the bureaucratic process slashed, Yudhoyono said, new pension payments could be approved in less than two months.

He added that complaints about the lengthy process were among the 822 cellphone text messages and 61 letters he had received from the public between May 1-15, as part of his SMS and PO Box 9949 program.

One person had complained that it took seven months to get his pension payments approved, the president said.

The current process for approving new pension payments starts with the state institution at which the applicant was last employed sending a letter to the Civil Service Administration Board (BAKN), a step that can take nearly three weeks.

It can then take up to four months for the BAKN to process the request and forward it to the Cabinet Secretariat, which takes up to three months to print out the approval form that has to be signed by the president.

Yudhoyono said this was unacceptably long, given that it took him less than a day to sign the form once it reached his desk.

“So that’s one day on my desk to cap off a seven-month process,” he said.

Yudhoyono said that besides the issue of pension payments, other topics that the public had written to him about included concerns over the activities of the outlawed Indonesian Islamic State (NII) movement, the campaign against terrorism and the teaching of Pancasila, the state ideology, in schools.

“We’ve also been asked to take steps to prevent accidents in the air, at sea and on land,” the president said.

“There were also requests to the government not to legalize marijuana, as well as calls of support for both the government and myself.”

Yudhoyono said he used the messages and letters he received as a gauge of pubic support for his government.

“[The messages] are often very frank,” he said.

“There are some that use harsh language, there are some with moderate language, but the majority are clear in their messages and objective.”

Source: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com

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