The Finance Ministry expects the new State Treasury and Budgetary System, called SPAN, to be ready by 2012 to produce better, integrated financial management reports.

The new system will integrate existing functions of the ministry's Directorate General of Treasury, responsible for recording the outflow of the state budget, with those of the Directorate General of Budget, responsible for designing the budget.

SPAN is based on the principle of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) used in many public institutions worldwide.

"SPAN is a solution incorporated into the budgetary process, by which the public comes to own the state budget of Indonesia as a development instrument.

Revenue, expenditure and financing are the factors affecting the economy and the people's prosperity," Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said Tuesday, reporting on progress in installing the SPAN system.

Representatives of the World Bank, the EU, the International Monetary Fund, the Australia-Indonesia Partnership, and the embassies of the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK attended the briefing.

Mulyani said there were three ways SPAN could improve financial management: namely via the business process, information technology and by changing mind-sets on the management of financial reports.

The improvement of the business process included eight modules: Budget design, budget allocation management, commitment management, payment management, state revenue, cash management, financial accounting standards and standard accounting tables and reports.

Meanwhile, the improvement of information technology included using an integrated and automatic single database, expected to reduce recurrent data processing problems.

The Supreme Audit Agency has repeatedly attached disclaimers to government's financial reports - meaning it has not provided a full opinion on the accounts - which the Finance Ministry has said was the result of variations in audit methodologies.

Mulyani also said human resources should be improved to change the mind-set of public officials so as to improve financial reports.

JP/ Aditya Suharmoko