Tema: Hubungan Keuangan Pusat dan Daerah (Desentralisasi Fiskal)

DANA DESA DAN BERBAGAI KONTROVERSI

Dilantiknya Presiden Joko Widodo sebagai Presiden Indonesia periode 2014-2019 mendapat
sorotan publik karena perubahan nomenklatur kementerian. Selain itu, Presiden Jokowi juga
melakukan perubahan besar-besaran terhadap Anggaran Belanja Pendapatan Negara 2015
di APBN-P 2015. Salah satu yang menjadi sorotan publik adalah kenaikan Dana Desa yang
mencapai 129%, dari Rp 9.066,2 Milyar di APBN 2015 menjadi Rp 20.766,2 Milyar.

Sesuai dengan amanat UU No. 6 tahun 2014 tentang Desa, Pemerintah mengalokasikan Dana
Desa yang bersumber dari Belanja Pusat sebesar 10% dari dan di luar dana transfer ke daerah
secara bertahap. Dana desa digunakan untuk membiayai penyelenggaraan pemerintahan,
pelaksanaan pembangunan, pembinaan kemasyarakatan, dan pemberdayaan masyarakat.
Beberapa pertimbangan dalam mengalokasikan dana desa adalah, yang pertama yaitu alokasi
dasar yang diterima merata oleh seluruh desa dan kemudian ada alokasi khusus yang
berdasarkan jumlah penduduk desa, jumlah penduduk miskin desa, luas wilayah desa, dan
indeks kesulitan geografis. Mekanisme pengalokasian adalah dari pusat ke kabupaten/kota
melalui Perpres rincian APBN, kemudian dialokasikan lebih lanjut dari kabupaten ke desa
melalui peraturan kepala daerah.
Di awal Pemerintahan Presiden Joko Widodo banyak pihak yang mengkritik kebijakan
Presiden yang dikabarkan akan mengucurkan dana sebesar 1 Milyar Rupiah untuk setiap desa
yang ada di Indonesia. Salah satu kritikan yang muncul adalah anggapan bahwa dana 1
Milyar tersebut tidak sesuai pengalokasiannya menimbang heterogenitas desa di Indonesia.
Desa-desa di Indonesia memiliki berbagai macm karakteristik yang berbeda seperti luas
wilayah, jumlah penduduk, keterjangkauan, tingkat perekonomian, dan sebagainya.
Kritikan tersebut kurang tepat sebab berdasarkan PP No. 60 Tahun 2014 menyebutkan bahwa
alokasi dana desa telah mempertimbangkan heterogenitas desa-desa di Indonesia dengan
adanya alokasi berdasarkan jumlah penduduk desa, jumlah penduduk miskin, luas daerah
desa, dan Indeks Kemahalan Konstruksi (IKK) serta Indeks Kesulitan Geografis (IKG),
bahkan variabel-variabel ini masuk ke dalam rumus menghitung alokasi dana desa.

Dana desa per kab/kota = 10% formula + 90% alokasi dasar

10% formula terdiri dari 25% jumlah penduduk desa, 35% jumlah penduduk miskin desa,
10% luas wilayah desa dan 30% IKK atau IKG.
Jadi, anggapan serta kritikan bahwa Pemerintah mengucurkan dana desa sebesar 1 Milyar
Rupiah secara cuma-cuma dan secara merata adalah tidak benar.
Kritikan kedua yang muncul adalah bahwa dana desa tidak mempertimbangkan adanya
ketimpangan pendapatan antardaerah. Daerah penghasil minyak bumi tentunya mendapat
penghasilan alam yang lebih besar dibandingkan daerah yang sektor utamanya adalah
pertanian. Karena alas an inilah, cara penyaluran Dana Desa dianggap kurang adil.
Dana Desa memang tidak mempertimbangkan variasi dalam pendapatan masing-masing desa
karena dasar pengalokasian berdasarkan variasi pendapatan kurang sesuai dengan funsgsi
Dana Desa. Selain itu, telah terdapat dana transfer dari Pemerintah Pusat untuk mengurangi
ketimpangan horizontal dimana salah satu dasar pertimbangan alokasi dananya adalah variasi
pendapatan, yaitu Dana Alokasi Umum. Dana Desa, seperti yang telah dijelaskan
sebelumnya, bertujuan terutama untuk pembangunan desa.
Kritikan selanjutnya adalah bahwa sistem pertanggungjawaban Dana Desa tidak jelas dan
terdapat banyak celah untuk memanfaatkannya. Kritik ini sebenarnya belum memiliki dasar,
karena keberadaan Dana Desa belumada cukup lama untuk melihat kelemahan dalam
pertanggungjawabannya. Tetapi dalam Peraturan Pemerintah 60 tahun 2014 pasal 24,
disebutkan bahwa Kepala Desa wajib menyampaikan laporan realisasi penggunaan dana desa
kepada bupati/walikota setiap semester, yang terdiri atas beberapa laporan keuangan yang
harus dapat dipertanggungjawabkan. Selanjutnya pasal 27 menyebutkan bahwa apabila
laporan-laporan tersebut terdapat ketidakwajaran, Kepala Desa bersangkutan dapat diberikan
sanksi. Hal ini menunjukkan bahwa rencana sistem pertanggungjawaban dana desa sudah
baik, walaupun dalam penerapannya mungkin berbeda.
Dengan berbagai kritkan yang muncul, diharapkan program Dana Desa ini berjalan dengan
baik, karena apabila program ini sukses,akan terjadi perkembangan yang sangat signifikan
dari desa-desa di Indonesia, karena dana tersebut dapat benar-benar digunakan untuk
peningkatan kemajuan desa-desa di republik ini.
Indonesian village decentralisation is all money no plan
27 June 2015

Author: Blane Lewis, ANU

Nearly 15 years after embarking on its large scale decentralisation initiative, Indonesia has
decided to extend its efforts to the village level. Decentralising to the nearly 74,000 villages is
intended to improve service delivery performance at the lowest administrative tier and reduce
social inequality and poverty. But the initiative is all money, with no clear plan.
The 2014 Village Law indicates that the central government will transfer up to 10 per cent of
total intergovernmental grants in the state budget to villages in the form of village funds
(Dana Desa). The 10 per cent ceiling is to be gradually phased in over a period of three years.
In 2015, villages are set to receive over 20 trillion rupiah (approximately US$1.5 billion)
in Dana Desa about three per cent of total central subnational transfers.
In addition, districts will be required to contribute 10 per cent of their own-source revenues,
revenue sharing grants, and general purpose transfers an estimated 40 trillion rupiah
(US$3 billion) to village budgets. The total amount of money to be distributed to villages
is not trivial. Taken together, these funds make up about three per cent of total projected state
budget spending in 2015. And, of course, when government makes good on its full Dana
Desa commitment, village funding will grow to even higher levels.
The village decentralisation process has only just begun and it is obviously premature to
examine and debate program implementation outcomes. But a number of potential difficulties
with the design of the nascent program have already become apparent.
Methods used to allocate funds to villages are particularly problematic. First, and very oddly,
funds distribution procedures insist to a large extent on equal allocations per village. This is
despite the significant heterogeneity among villages, including in terms of population, land
area and poverty.
The fixation on per village allocations may be a function of the manner in which the program
was originally promoted by politicians to the public. During the 2014presidential
elections both candidates (Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto) strongly supported the
village decentralisation initiative. The popular refrain, used occasionally by both candidates,
was satu desa, satu milyar one village, one billion rupiah. Unfortunately, the campaign
soundbite has been translated directly into policy. But in the first year of implementation
villages will receive less than one-third of the indicated amount inadvertently a good
thing, owing to the problems discussed here.

Second, allocation procedures ignore other sources of revenue to which villages have access,
especially from districts. Villages that have access to large natural resource-based transfers
from their districts will receive the same amount of Dana Desa as villages located in districts
that are less abundantly endowed. Village revenues will therefore be very inequitably
distributed. Villages in regions with high levels of poverty especially in Eastern Indonesia
will receive less money than they need, and villages with access to significant funding
from oil and gas revenues particularly in Riau and East Kalimantan will receive more
than required.
There are other challenges as well. Village service responsibilities are unclearly defined. The
legal and regulatory framework provides only a general indication of village service
responsibilities. Central, provincial and district governments will be responsible for detailing
the actual tasks that villages will perform at a later date. Despite claims by Indonesian
policymakers that money follows function best practices in fiscal decentralisation in
this case the opposite is true.
Village public financial management (PFM) systems are inadequately prepared to handle the
large increases in funding. Villages are set to receive between 510 times the amount of funds
that they typically manage. Existing village PFM procedures have developed over the course
of many years in the context of relatively limited service responsibilities and comparatively
trivial amounts of funding. The transaction-intensive systems may have proved largely
adequate in the pre-village decentralisation period, but they are unlikely to be well suited or
sufficiently robust in the new scaled-up environment.
Perhaps most worryingly, mechanisms to control village spending are severely
underdeveloped. Villages have for 10 years run the National Program for Community
Empowerment (PNPM), which involves implementing poverty reduction efforts with strong
social accountability mechanisms. But the degree to which this mostly positive experience
will be transferable to more extensive village decentralisation is unclear. In particular, the
government has not yet fully resolved the problem of who will lead horizontal accountability
efforts, and whether the facilitators of the largely successfully PNPM program will be
involved. A second worry is that no provisions have yet been made for external audits of
village-executed budgets.
The future of village decentralisation is, of course, hard to predict. Indonesia may yet muddle
through, as it has in the past. But, unless resolved, the above difficulties will severely

constrain the achievement of official program objectives and create further challenges for
reformers in their attempts to combat corruption at the subnational level.
Blane Lewis is Associate Professor and Senior Fellow at the Arndt-Corden Department of
Economics, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
Sumber: http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2015/06/27/indonesian-village-decentralisation-is-allmoney-no-plan/