Social aid exclusion errors spur call for bigger data registry budget

Statistics Indonesia (BPS) has admitted a significant error rate of 23 percent in its mathematical model for estimating household expenditure within the Single National Socioeconomic Data (DTSEN). This inaccuracy, which has decreased from an initial 37 percent, raises concerns about the potential exclusion of millions of poor families from receiving the social aid they require.

Media Askar Wahyudi, public policy director at the Center of Economic and Law Studies (Celios), urged the government to allocate more budget towards enhancing Indonesia's social protection data system. He emphasized that "garbage in, garbage out," highlighting that flawed data leads to problematic regression and modeling techniques.

Wahyudi called for a reconsideration of poverty measurement methods and suggested redirecting funds toward improved data collection techniques. He argued for conducting a census rather than relying on surveys to obtain actual expenditure data. These errors in social protection data could lead to eligible poor households being left without assistance, ultimately imposing a larger cost on society.