Beneficial ownership transparency in Indonesia: scoping study

Introduction

Indonesia has made a series of commitments to improve transparency over who ultimately owns and benefits from its companies. These include a National Strategy for Corruption Prevention (referred to as Stranas PK) 2021-2022 [1], and the Open Government Partnership National Action Plan 2020-2022 [2]. As a member of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), Indonesia produced a beneficial ownership roadmap for the extractive industries for 2016-2020.

As a reflection of the high priority the government assigns to these efforts, the President’s Office directly supervises the work of the Stranas PK team. This team coordinates the beneficial ownership transparency (BOT) work, as well as the implementation agency responsible for ensuring the interoperability of government services. In October 2018, the President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, issued a Presidential Decree to establish the necessary legislation and processes for obtaining beneficial ownership (BO) information. As a result of these efforts, the country has produced a full-economy central register under the stewardship of the Ministry of Law and Human Rights (MLHR). About 29% of Indonesian entities had reported their BO data as of August 2022, [3] and the government is seeking to both drive-up compliance rates and incorporate existing BO data from other state agencies into the MLHR register.

To support the government in its efforts to improve the quantity and quality of BO data, in July 2021 Indonesia signed up to the Opening Extractives (OE) programme, a joint initiative of the EITI and Open Ownership, to receive enhanced technical assistance and support over the coming years. This report has been drafted within the context of this programme, and is intended to help inform the next stage of reforms and technical assistance work provided under this initiative. It assesses the state of implementation of beneficial ownership transparency in Indonesia and analyses the country’s progress against each of the nine Open Ownership Principles, which set out good practice for effective BO disclosure. This evaluation forms the basis for a series of recommendations for future iterative improvements to Indonesia’s disclosure regime in the areas of policy, technology and data.

Next page: Open Ownership Principles in use in Indonesia