Jakarta. Transparency watchdog the Indonesian Forum for Budget Transparency, or Fitra, has called on political parties to disclose their annual budget in the aftermath of the "candidacy fee" controversy during the Golkar Party's chairmanship race.

Fitra researcher Gulfino Che Guevaratto said Fitra has challenged the 10 political parties who made the electoral threshold in the 2014 legislative elections to disclose their annual budget and funding to the public for the sake of transparency and accountability.

Fitra has filed official requests for the budget disclosure to the political parties' Jakarta leadership boards, the Ministry of Home Affairs' national unity and politics directorate general and the Jakarta administration, Gulfino said.

Gulfino said the 2008 Law on Public Information Openness stipulates that all political parties must provide report on every funding taken from the state budget.

According to the law, every year the government must give Rp 108 for each vote collected by political parties in the latest legislative election — money which they can then use to fund their operations. However, the regulation also says that the parties have to submit proper funding reports.

“If there's no response to the request, after 14 days Fitra will submit an objection to the Public Information Commission,” Gulfino said in Jakarta on Tuesday (10/05).

Fitra launched similar requests in 2011 and 2013, but received scant response from the political parties and authorities. Another anti-corruption watchdog Indonesian Corruption Watch, or ICW, also filed a complaint to pressure political parties to disclose their budget in 2012. The Commission ruled in the watchdog's favor, but in the end the budget reports disclosed by the political parties were deemed by many to be insufficiently transparent to say the least.

Gulfino said Fitra decided to submit the new request after the Golkar Party decided to charge a Rp 1 billion ($75,200) registration fee to would-be candidates in its upcoming chairmanship election. Fitra said this has set a poor example for Indonesia's growing democracy.

Gulfino said he feared other political parties will emulate Golkar and charge exorbitant "candidacy fees" in next year's simultaneous regional elections.

“As the 'infrastructure fund' corruption case involving lawmaker Damayanti [Wisnu Putranti] showed, the money was misused to fund regional election campaigns in Semarang and Demak [in Central Java]. Exorbitant candidacy fees and corruption are closely related,” Gulfino said.

Damayanti, a lawmaker from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, was nabbed in a sting operation and named suspect by national antigraft agency KPK in a Rp 100-billion bribery case in a state-funded road construction project in Maluku in 2016. Budi Supriyanto of the Golkar Party was also named a suspect in the case.

Other corruption cases also indicate that more money is being pumped into securing party chairmanships every year. Democratic Party treasurer M. Nazaruddin was convicted of siphoning off state money from the graft-ridden Hambalang Sporting Complex project, apparently to help Anas Urbaningrum win the party's chairmanship race in 2010. Both are currently serving jail sentences after the antigraft agency found their involvement in one of the most high-profile corruption cases in the country.