This study contemplates the impact of the budgetary slack behavior on provincial government's APBD budget surplus throughout Indonesia. Using data of APBDs of all provincial governments of Indonesia from 2008 to 2012, the results show that self-interest behavior in budget, myopic behavior, and dependency on transfer have their respective impacts on budget surplus. On the other hand, the behavior of deposit utilization for self-interest has an insignificant impact on budget surplus. These behaviors are adjusted by self-interest motivation while avoiding uncertainty and inability to predict future budget. The motive of avoiding the uncertainty and inability to predict future budgets indicates that provincial governments have remained to utilize incremental budgeting methods. This study contributes to the literature of budgeting by investigating the slack behavior using secondary data to objectively investigate and complement findings from primary data usually used in the previous study.

Key words: Budget surplus, Budgetary Slack, APBD, local government, incremental budgeting