Faulty Audit, Phantom Losses, and a Case Built on Sand -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

In any nation that still purports to believe in the rule of law, a corruption case stands or falls on evidence, rather than delivery. It should be based on actionable data, legal processes & an evident causation chain. As soon as prosecutors take assumptions for evidence and administrative suspicion for juridic certainty, the courtroom ceases to be a forum of justice and enters into the theater of institutional convenience.

Hence any case based on an inaccurate audit and imaginary state losses should be treated internationally. Not because corruption is something we should excuse, but because campaigns against it become supremely perilous when stripped of evidentiary discipline. There is no longer fighting corruption, a state rewards without demonstrating evident loss or tangible wrongfulness and causation. It is normalizing arbitrary power.

The heart of the scandal in such a case is not therefore any technical weakness. This is epistemic fraud dressed as legal seriousness. An audit conducted without appropriate constitutional or statutory authority is already on shakey ground, and its conclusions suspect. The process is corrupted from the outset if it is conducted absent a valid investigative predicate. And if the calculation of “state losses” does not take into account what kind of good or service that took actual place, then this figure is not a legal fact. It is a bureaucratic fiction.

And this is how flimsy allegations are nearly always blown up into a highly publicised blow up. A number is produced. The media amplifies it. Political actors weaponize it. Outrage is evidence and scepticism complicity, we are informed. But the law does not function like that; or, at least it should not. The defendant is not required to disprove a hypothetical loss. It is incumbent upon the state to demonstrate with absolute certainty, and in accordance with law, that loss was a cause.

That distinction matters. Deeply. Because once possible loss is allowed to masquerade as proven, every single public procurement decision that goes wrong can be court-criminalised in retrospect. Then, any disagreement over a policy can be reframed as corruption. They can inflate every administrative imperfection into a crime, one could say. This is not accountability. It is legal opportunism.

It should be a cause for particular concern to international observers when all three of the essential pillars typical of a corruption charge start to fall down at once: no unquestionably tangible loss, no obviously unlawful act and little if any credible causal connection between an alleged act and the asserted injury. Take away any one of them, and the case falls apart. Take out all three, and what is left behind isn’t prosecution. It is accusation by atmosphere.

The broader danger is institutional. When poorly drafted audit reports are treated as more sacred than scripture, they don’t bolster anti-corruption enforcement; to the contrary. They inform investigators that procedural shortcuts are permissible. They advise prosecutors that flimsy evidence can prevail if it is couched in moral terms. They tell judges that public pressure might be more important than the coherence of evidence. As the coarseness of this improvised legalism builds, it no longer even differentiates between genuine corruption and prosecutorial improvisation.

This is a case for states to lose their credibility. Not because they refuse to punish wrong, but because of the way they do it. The international community has seen this pattern before: use of anti-corruption language as a cover for procedurally flawed prosecutions, legal form preserving an illusion of justice while substantive standards blend gradually but imperceptibly into the background. A perilous pattern, because it panders to public outrage while undermining due process.

A serious legal system must have the guts to say a hard thing: not every allegationdeserves conviction, and not every audit deserves credence. If the alleged state loss is merely assumption, if how it was done fails basic science and evidence standards (or are tautological), if one has no jurisdiction to do so in relation to where they go about building such cases or other theory of authority or standing does not point that direction or prove causation then their case seems built on sand. And sand may last long enough for headlines but never long enough for justice.

How loudly a nation condemns corruption is not the best way to measure its commitment to rule of law. Can it resist the urge to convict first and prove later? Not only the accused are victims when bogus audits generate ghost losses. It is the essence of legal order itself.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia