Take a look again at the TBI Bekasi income sheet and you will see that including Rp 257.000.000 of ‘non-TBI courses’ on a TBI income sheet is not the only piece of roguery which Binsar is up to. Michelle hinted absurdly that this may not be illegal because we don’t have the franchise agreement! Well I worked as school manager of a franchise school for 2 and a half years and Sutanto and Japri (the owners) were certain that they had to pay 4% royalties on ALL courses. The idea that we could use the TBI name and the TBI premises but just mark the income as ‘off the book for my pocket’ is so absurd that I didn’t even understand what he was suggesting at first. I ask you, could the owner of a KFC restaurant just say these particular chicken breasts are ‘non-KFC chicken’ and leave them off the accounts? Perhaps Michelle has been hanging around crooks and tax evaders so long that her understanding of the real world has become irredeemably warped. Franchisees cannot mysteriously declare a portion of their income as ‘non-franchise income’ and pocket it. This is just pure nonsense. Sutanto hated Head Office for sending him Helmy V., a known thief, and asked me many times to try and ‘under-declare’ income to minimize royalties. If he thought he could avoid royalties by saying ‘this isn’t TBI income’, he would have, but the idea is so blatantly absurd he never suggested it. TBI courses have to appear on TBI accounts: funny that.

But ‘off the books’ TBI courses are just the start of the weird stuff where Binsar is concerned. An eye-opener for me was Part 8. of the Bekasi Teacher’s Report in which he disclosed that the Marketing Officer was offered a piddling 1.3 juta a month- the minimum wage for Jakarta! This wage is an insult to the title of Marketing Officer and reveals that Binsar’s cheapness is off the scale. He is obsessively, abnormally, indecently cheap- a true miser in the worst sense. It also shows why his school has rock-bottom revenue. He won’t spend the money he needs to to make a success of it.

But look at the ‘staff expenses’ column on the income sheet and a strange irregularity appears. Remember Binsar had only a maximum of two Student assistants, an Office Assistant who lived in the ‘attic’ and received a pittance for his efforts and Binsar went long periods without a Marketing Officer. Add up these staff salaries and you get a total of less than Rp 5 million a month. Yet the ‘staff expenses’ column lists a figure of Rp 19 million for May 2012. Hmmm.Now it is is possible that these ‘staff expenses’ include Binsar’s salary, as he is the minority owner of the business, with Pak Basuki taking the lion’s share. TBI Kuningan included the manager’s salary in ‘staff expenses’ even when it was an expat. It is not inconceivable that Binsar was receiving Rp 15 million a month.

However in June 2012 these staff expenses spike to a new high of over Rp 35 juta and they stay around this high mark for the rest of the year, reaching Rp 37 million in August. So why did ‘staff expenses’ balloon by Rp 15 million in a failing school, almost doubling in the space of a month? It makes no sense at all. What we see here is staff receiving less than Rp 5 million in wages in total and Binsar putting Rp 35 million on the income sheet. Is this just a way for Binsar to avoid paying tax? (We will look at his rock bottom tax payments next week). Is he pretending there are no profits so as to avoid corporate tax? Or has he increased his own salary to a massive Rp 30 million a month in an attempt to achieve the same ends? Either way, this sudden doubling of ‘staff expenses’ when the actual staff were receiving next to nothing is weird to say that least. In fact it reminds me of the wise words of the original BEkasi teacher:

Everything Binsar does should be viewed with the utmost suspicion.