Rosan Perkasa Roeslani, Head of the Daya Anagata Nusantara Investment Management Agency (Danantara), hurried to the Presidential Palace in Jakarta on Thursday, May 21, 2026. President Prabowo Subianto had summoned several of his ministers that afternoon to discuss the technical aspects of a policy requiring exports to be channeled through state-owned enterprises. “I’m here to report on the mechanism,” said Rosan, who also serves as Minister of Investment and Downstreaming.
Alongside Rosan, Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa arrived bearing data. He revealed that a joint team from the Ministry of Finance, the Attorney General’s Office, and the Development Finance Comptroller (BPKP) had just conducted a random audit of ten major crude palm oil (CPO) exporter companies.
The findings showed strong indications of underinvoicing practices, including for exports destined for the United States. The scheme, Purbaya explained, involved deliberately reporting the price of CPO in Indonesia at only one-third or one-quarter of the price recorded in the United States. “One company shipping goods to America reported an export value of US$ 2.6 million, while the receiving country recorded US$ 4.2 million meaning the reported value was 57 percent lower. So the export value declared here was far smaller,” he said.
President Prabowo harshly condemned these foreign trade fraud practices. “This is why teachers’ salaries are low, why law enforcement officers’ and civil servants’ salaries are low. This is what always makes the budget insufficient,” he said in a speech at a plenary session of the House of Representatives in Jakarta on Wednesday, May 20, 2026.
The President cited underinvoicing, underaccounting, transfer pricing, and smuggling as the channels through which state revenues are being drained. He claimed that losses to the state from these various practices over the past 34 years (1991–2024) had reached US$ 908 billion, or approximately Rp 15,400 trillion.
He described underinvoicing as fraud on paper. “Businesspeople sell from their companies here in the country to their companies abroad, but do not report it correctly,” he said.
The Scope of the Problem
Underinvoicing is a form of fraud in which exporters or importers deliberately report the value of goods on invoices lower than the actual transaction price. This illegal practice is commonly used to evade tax and duty obligations, and can also serve as a mechanism for secretly moving funds abroad or concealing profits from domestic tax authorities.
Transparency advocates say the government’s diagnosis of a misinvoicing emergency is valid. Among them is Publish What You Pay (PWYP) Indonesia, a civil society coalition that has been pushing for improved governance in the energy and natural resources sector and has raised this issue consistently over the past decade.
PWYP Indonesia National Coordinator Aryanto Nugroho said the manipulation of export records in the natural resources sector has been growing increasingly sophisticated. “Similar patterns have even intensified in the nickel sector alongside the downstreaming policy,” he said on Friday, May 22, 2026.
This is reflected in the findings of a joint research project by PWYP, the Center of Economic and Law Studies (Celios), and Yayasan Indonesia Cerah, released on Saturday, May 16, 2026. The collaborative study provided strong evidence of large-scale, structured trade misinvoicing in Indonesia’s nickel industry between 2020 and 2024.
The practice is believed to have been deliberately carried out through discrepancies in the reporting of goods’ values between Indonesian customs authorities and the customs authorities of the countries of export or origin. By manipulating figures in trade documents, as noted in the Celios report, corporate actors are strongly suspected of attempting to conceal actual profits to avoid higher domestic tax liabilities and illegally shift capital abroad.
In the category of export overinvoicing, the study recorded a cumulative figure of US$ 2.03 billion. Strikingly, this trade corridor was highly concentrated toward a single primary destination: China dominated the flow with a share of 86.65 percent.
Conversely, the study also detected export underinvoicing totaling US$ 2.05 billion in cumulative terms. Unlike the overinvoicing pattern, the largest concentration of underinvoicing manipulation flowed toward the United Kingdom, accounting for 50.92 percent.
Another finding was import underinvoicing worth US$ 258.7 million, predominantly routed through Singapore, which accounted for 68.70 percent. “The differences in geography and manipulation patterns show just how complex and sophisticated the profit-flight routes used by industry actors have become,” the joint research report noted.
Celio’s Fiscal Justice Director, Media Wahyudi Askar, estimated that the actual state losses could be far higher than the Rp 15,400 trillion figure cited by President Prabowo. The UN Comtrade database used by the government, he argued, only captures the surface layer. To obtain accurate figures, the state would need to be able to trace data at the level of sales invoices, bilateral contracts, and real-time unit price movements, the kind of system already implemented by Singapore.
Research and publication institute Next Indonesia Center produced a study titled “Ghost Funds on the Export Route,” published on August 28, 2025. Covering the period 2014–2023, the study found overinvoicing averaging US$25.3 billion per year and underinvoicing averaging US$40.2 billion per year. Crude palm oil (CPO) was among the largest offenders, recording overinvoicing of US$ 35 billion and underinvoicing of US$ 1.6 billion.
A policy brief by the research institute Prakarsa from March 2023 also noted that trade leakage has continually damaged the overall economy by transferring domestic wealth abroad. The Prakarsa study found that between 1989 and 2017 alone, illicit financial flows from six major commodities, coal, copper, palm oil, rubber, coffee, and fisheries, reached US$ 11.1 billion, with the highest leakage in the coal sector at US$ 5.32 billion. Meanwhile, in 2018, the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries estimated the fisheries sector’s leakage from illegal fishing at Rp 2,000 trillion.
Why a Single Export Body Won’t Be Enough
However, according to Aryanto Nugroho, the government’s decision to establish a single export body will not automatically close the loopholes. He said the root of the problem lies at the transaction level — manipulation of prices, volumes, quality, and Harmonized System (HS) code classifications, the international standard for categorizing goods.
There is another risk: state-owned enterprises that transact with overseas affiliates could face the same incentives to underinvoice and may be harder to supervise if their public accountability is weak.
Aryanto warned of a troubling historical precedent. “The experience of the Clove Buffer and Marketing Agency (BPPC) and Bulog shows that centralization without checks and balances actually increases the risk of rent-seeking by those with close ties to power,” he said.
Rather than monopolizing exports, PWYP recommends that the government improve the real-time data exchange system between domestic authorities, customs, taxation, and the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK) — as well as between countries. The government is also urged to rigorously verify the true beneficial owners of corporations, rather than relying solely on self-declarations.
Sumber: Tempo