The Illusion of Objectivity: Contesting State Loss Calculations as Judicial Dogma in Anti Corruption Trials -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

The state audit report has attained near-untouchable status in contemporary anti-corruption enforcement. What is termed by authorized institutions with technocratic vocabulary as “State financial loss” is, as a matter of course, not regarded (by courts) to be contestable evidence but instead judicial fact. It is cited by courts, it is weaponized by prosecutors and most disturbingly, it is often get deferred to by judges. You have not merely evidence-based reliance, but epistemic subordination.

This ongoing phenomenon illustrates a pernicious myth: that assessments of loss are fundamentally scientific, impartial and non-controversial acts carried out by an expert class. But these calculations are staunchly constructed, methodologically conditional and invariably coloured by institutional bias. But they operate as dogma in courtrooms.

It is a category error at the heart of this problem. Whereas financial loss in corruption cases is not obvious and speaks for itself, but a normative and methodological construct. Valuation models, causation assumptions, opportunity cost frameworks and even regulatory compliance interpretations yield widely different answers. A single procurement irregularity, for example could give rise to more than one “loss” number depending on whether market comparison or total loss or net loss methodologies is applied. Choosing between methods is not partly interpretive and therefore contestable.

But this is, in practice, systematically stifled. Audit institutions, supreme audit bodies or internal government auditors and so on enjoy a misproportionate power over their conclusions, effectively treating them as quasi-judicial facts by virtue of this. These reports are rarely interrogated epistemically by the courts. Instead, they elevate them to conclusive proof in and of themselves: offloading the task of judicial reasoning into a bureaucratic calculation.

Consequences for defendants are severe. The equality of arms principle (a hallmark right to fair trial guarantee) is significantly undermined. It is difficult to defend against this, not because the arguments they offer for dismissal are particularly profound but in part because there is already an imaginary hierarchy of knowledge that has been established and accepted into practice as a result and presumes state-generated expertise must be superior. The audit report not only is evidence, but serves as a starting point that structures the case.

This dynamic creates a situation that can only be called epistemic injustice. The defendant is not just disputing the facts but an entire form of knowledge that has become essentially institutionalized, and one immune to challenge. By treating audit findings with deference and without close estimates, courts stymie alternative readings of evidence and push independent expertise to the margins. The trial is no longer a place for the search of truth; it has become an act where pre-determined conclusions are legitimised.

In addition, it makes matters worse that many audit reports are methodologically opaque. Many key assumptions are not transparency while calculation models inadequately explained, and margins of error wholly ignored. And yet those same reports are treated as having a precision and certainty that they do not, nor can ever truly have. The facade of mathematical precision conceals a world shaped by interpretive agency.

This is not just a technical failure; this is an inherent flaw in the administration of justice. Thus, by transforming audit outputs into judicial dogma this gives leeway for legal systems to obliterate the difference between evidence and authority. The result is an almost ghostly role for the auditor: a shadow decision-maker, except that their findings rarely face failed adversarial checks of due process.

It is not to deny the need to fight corruption that you challenge this orthodoxy. More, it is to insist that the pursuit of accountability cannot come at a trade-off for legal integrity. Anti-corruption initiatives based on irrefutable numbers have only a step away from instruments of injustice against the very legitimacy they hope to preserve.

So state loss determination is not politicized, or more precisely it needs urgent re-politicization (better: re-legalization). Courts need to reclaim their function as discerning assessors of data, not just passive consumers of executive product. Audit reports should be treated like any other piece of evidence, too: open to sceptical cross-examination and methodological critique; best introduced alongside competing expert testimony.

Your data does not automatically make you objective, and that is a claim to earn through transparency (where possible), contestability of practice, and methodologyal rigor. Until this is acknowledged, how deprivation of states in achieved will be less a measure for injury than just an implementer to finding fault. And justice, descale down to simple arithmetic, will remain anything but just.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner of Law Firm Victorious Indonesia