Maladministration and Corruption in Village Fund Management: Legal Boundaries and Protection for Village Heads

Abstract

Village funds were designed to accelerate local development, yet their management has become a recurrent source of criminal cases against village heads. The line between maladministration, which calls for administrative correction, and corruption, which calls for criminal sanction, remains unclear, and existing studies rarely connect that line to the legal protection owed to village heads suspected of corruption. This article aims to analyze the forms of unlawful acts constituting maladministration and corruption in village fund management policy and the legal protection available to village heads. It employs normative legal research with statute, conceptual, and philosophical approaches, using primary, secondary, and tertiary legal materials collected through document study and analyzed descriptively and qualitatively through deductive reasoning. The findings show that corruption is distinguished from maladministration by deliberate and concealed diversion of authority for personal benefit that causes real state loss, whereas deviations without these features call for administrative correction. Protection for village heads operates through preventive, procedural, and administrative layers, but gaps remain in the availability of administrative court testing, the procedural scope of pretrial review, and the dual role of inspectorate audits. The article offers a clearer doctrinal basis for regulators, law enforcement agencies, and village governments to separate administrative error from criminal conduct while safeguarding the rights of suspected officials.