Tapera Issues: Withheld Savings and Misdirected Financing

The People's Housing Savings Program (Tapera) is a government-designed financing program to assist low-income individuals in purchasing, renovating, or building homes.

Tapera financing primarily comes from participant savings. However, since 2022, the Tapera Management Agency (BP Tapera) has also disbursed Housing Financing Liquidity Facility (FLPP), which is government housing subsidy funds.

According to the *Tapera Program Management Report*, in 2022, the realization of Tapera financing agreements reached Rp640.78 billion for 5,712 housing units.

Throughout 2022, BP Tapera also disbursed financing through the FLPP scheme with a total value of Rp25.15 trillion for 226,000 housing units.

However, the disbursement of these funds has not been entirely flawless.

In the Semester II 2022 edition of the *Summary of Audit Results* (IHPS), the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) stated that there was misdirected disbursement of FLPP funds from BP Tapera amounting to Rp26.24 billion.

The BPK assessed that the FLPP disbursement was problematic because it was given to debtors who did not meet the criteria of low-income individuals, there were indications that their houses were unoccupied, and there were indications that their houses were rented out or resold.

Previously, in the Semester II 2021 edition of the IHPS report, the BPK also stated that 124,960 Tapera participants had not received their savings refunds. The total value of the withheld savings at that time reached Rp567.45 billion.

In the two IHPS reports mentioned above, the BPK noted several other problems experienced by BP Tapera, such as participant data anomalies, duplicate savings refunds, inconsistencies in debtor debt data, and handling of credit settlements that did not comply with regulations.

In general, in the Semester II 2021 and Semester II 2022 editions of the IHPS report, the BPK found that BP Tapera still had several weaknesses in its internal control system, non-compliance with regulations, and issues of uneconomical, inefficient, and ineffective practices.