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Rodyah Widyarini, S.E,.M.M
Journal of Law, Public Policy and Public Finance (2026)
National fiscal statistics are used as though they were complete. This research note establishes that one widely used Indonesian series is not, identifies precisely what is absent, and traces the consequences for the analyses built on it. Reconciling the Directorate General of Fiscal Balance budget file for fiscal year 2025 against its realisation file for 2024 shows that ten district-level jurisdictions present in the first are absent from the second, including Kabupaten Kudus, which reported in 2023 and holds a budgeted tax revenue of IDR 309 billion. Six of the ten are in the Papua-region provinces, so the omissions are concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions about which least is otherwise known. The note further documents that the realisation file contains 536 governments rather than the 541 rows a naive read returns, that its total column carries no header, that its mineral tax taxonomy includes twenty of thirty-seven nominal objects with non-contiguous codes, and that at least two large districts filed returns reporting their entire tax revenue in a single category. It argues that completeness is a reportable property of a statistical product, that none of these features is disclosed in the files, and that each is detectable by arithmetic checks the compiling agency could run before publication.