At their first joint meeting, the Committee on Labor, Health and Social Welfare and the Committee on Economy, Finance and Budget held a control hearing on the subject of “Public procurements in the health sector”. The discussion was aimed at providing an overview of key problems causing the present crisis in the health sector, particularly the issue of introducing a centralized system of public procurements, problems in tendering for procurement of medicines, etc.
Besides the Minister of Finance and the Director of Public Procurement Administration, the meeting was attended by the Director of the Health Insurance Fund, the Director of Clinical Centre of Montenegro, the Director of Institute for Public Health and Pharmacy “Montefarm” and the Programme Coordinator at Centre for Monitoring and Research (CeMi).
President of the Managing Board of Institute Alternative, Stevo Muk, took part in the discussion and pointed out the issues caused by different interpretations of the Law on Public Procurements in public procurement procedures, as well as the deficiencies of particular legal provisions and the ways of overcoming them.
The Parliamentary hearing on the subject of “Implementation of the Law on Non-Governmental Organizations in Financing“ has started within the Committee on Economy, Finance and Budget. The aim of this hearing was to offer comprehensive analysis of the issue of funding of non-governmental organizations and to provide suggestions on the ways of improving NGO funding system.
President of the Managing Board of Institute Alternative, Stevo Muk, took part in this hearing upon invitation. Representatives of the Commission for the Allocation of Revenue from Games of Chance, the Government’s Council for Cooperation with NGOs, Center for Development of NGOs, Coalition of NGOs “Through Cooperation to the Aim”, NGO Highlanders, and NGO Civic Alliance, also participated in this hearing.
The Committee members agreed to formulate joint conclusions of the meeting after the discussion was over. Date of the 30th Sitting of the Committee will be defined in due time.
European Commission says: “The plan for the reorganisation of the public sector, which had been endorsed by the government in April 2012, was finalised and adopted in July 2013. This version provides a sector analysis with a view to identifying adequate staffing levels and increasing efficiency”. It is a document Government of Montenegro has been hiding from Montenegrin public for already 4 months. Institute Alternative warned about the issue in September, but we received no official response or reaction from the Government so far.
Being doubtful as usual, we could think that the document is still being prepared and that only God knows what it will contain once when it is published. Yet, it seems that the European Commission had an insight into this plan.
If we would be hairsplitting, we could address the Agency for Data Protection and Access To Information and possibly urge the state prosecution to reveal who breached the Law on Confidential Data and revealed confidential information to the officer of the European Commission. Even if there was no criminal liability or misdemeanor in such behavior, it certainly demonstrated disrespect of the local public and usual servitude to the international public. Our Government deems external decision-makers being aware of its hard work the most important.
Our Government was not ready during the whole two years, which it spent writing and amending the Plan, to consult those affected by this document, namely public sector employees and their trade unions. Not to mention the Parliament, parliamentary committee for political system, judiciary and administration, non-governmental organizations and University. Instead of fostering distrust into the politically sensitive document by declaring its confidentiality, the Government could have spread the trust by inclusion of the interested public and pursuit for the best solutions. When measures and activities outlined in the Plan reach agendas of Parliament and the Government, the public will naturally meet them with distrust and rejection.
In its most recent report, European Commission says: “At the end of 2012, 112 senior officials and 36 heads of administrative bodies delivered, at the request of the government, undated resignation letters. Subsequently, a small number of these resignations were accepted. Even if motivated by the desire to enhance performance, this practice breaches employment rights and undermines public officials’ professional independence of undue political influence“. It adds: “The undated resignations are an issue of concern”.
Djukanovic’s relationship towards the critics of undated resignations demonstrated that he is not willing to disrupt the line merging the leader, party and the state. He explained nicely what the undated resignations meant – a mechanism to ensure obedience, and from where he drained the inspiration. Again Serbia when it is a bad practice. Djukanovic, however, thinks that undated resignations, which he sought and received, are something entirely different.
He says that nobody asked him to explain what they were exactly about. If he had been asked, he would easily solve it. Nonetheless, the well informed ones know that he had been asked, numerous times. On his part, he tried to explain the legal foundation of his move clumsily, by citing articles of the Law which say nothing about undated resignations. In other words, he implied that people started delivering undated resignations on their own, just to open another affair, to libel the top state officials, topple the legitimate and legal ruling elite and to surrender the state into the occupier’s hands.
Yet, the explanations are elsewhere. The party discipline still spills over into the state administration. The resignations are illegal, as the prime minister Djukanovic admitted himself by saying that if the systemic law protected them, there was no possibility for anyone, including the prime minister, to order someone to resign. It is only unclear to whom and how these resignations were submitted, what happened with those who didn’t file resignations since Djukanovic himself implied that there were exemptions. It is also unclear what happened with those who didn’t demonstrated high level of trust in the party and him personally.
Djukanovic is still worried only of Montenegro not having the special Ministry for fight against affairs. Report of the European Commission says that there are no efficient investigations into the high level corruption, and that the organized crime remains an issue of serious concern. Here lies the difference: Djukanovic wants fight against those raising up the voice about the crime, and the EU – fight against the crime.
Stevo Muk
President of the Managing Board
The text was originally published in the Forum section of daily Vijesti.
Institutions, key for the oversight of recruitment and promotion in Montenegro’s state administration, lack resources to efficiently perform their duties.
Human Resources Management Authority has a key role in implementing vacancy announcements for state authorities, while the Administrative Inspection within the Ministry of Interior Affairs has a key role in performing oversight of the implementation of these procedures.
Capacities of these institutions are thus of extreme importance for implementation of the new Law on Civil Servants and State Employees, which is expected, as the most recent European Commission’s progress report on Montenegro stated, to lay foundations for professional and impartial state administration.
Institute Alternative (IA) continuously follows implementation of the new Law, by focusing on the implementation of the new rules of recruitment and promotion of on civil servants and state employees.
However, findings of the semiannual monitoring report of recruitment and promotion in state authorities point that not all the institutional preconditions for proper implementation of the new rules are not met.
In July, Human Resources Management Authority had 28 employees, although its new Rulebook on internal organization and systematization envisaged 45 persons for performing this institution’s tasks.
In general, existing human resources and space capacities are not satisfactory, given the scope of the competences of Human Resources Management Authority.
Illustratively, now it takes approximately ten days to implement procedures for testing candidates’ abilities. According to the previous Law on Civil Servants and State Employees, these procedures were realized within two days on average.
Capacities of Administrative Inspection, which is in charge of determining illegalities and irregularities during the procedures for filling and announcing vacant posts in state authorities, are also not satisfactory.
In July 2013, 4 administrative inspectors are active although the earlier rulebook on internal organization and systematization of the Ministry of Interior Affairs envisaged recruitment of 7 of them, while the current rulebook envisaged job positions for 9 administrative inspectors.
With an aim of preventing abuses and circumventing new rules of recruitment and promotion in state authorities, the IA considers necessary to ensure the funds for all the envisaged job positions in the Human Resources Management Authority and Administrative Inspection to be filled.
Both government and parliament should include the needs of these institutions.
First six months of implementation of the Law on Civil Servants and State Employees had certain positive effects. Internet presentation of the Human Resource Management Authority offers a detailed insight into the reports on testing abilities and evaluation of candidates for job positions in state authorities. Also, filling of vacancies analyzed by the Institute Alternative, from the aspect of the time period between launching the procedures and selection of the candidate, can be assessed as efficient. However, until July 1, 2013, some of the legal and institutional preconditions for the application of the act were not met. Six out of thirteen envisaged by-laws, which were expected to elaborate the implementation of the new law, did not enter into force within the reporting period.
The report focuses on filling the vacancies in state administration. Furthermore, the focus is on those job positions which prescribe the general obligation of the head of the state authority to select the candidates who received the highest ranking during the previously regulated procedures of testing and evaluation. Only seven persons were selected in line with these procedures for job positions in state administration in the period between January 1 and July 1, 2013. In all seven cases, ranking list was composed of one candidate, who was subsequently selected for the certain job position. On average, 58 days was needed for these vacancies to be filled.
Around half of the state administration authorities aligned their acts of systematization and internal organization with the new law by July 1. Only five of them have done so within the prescribed deadline of 60 days after the start of the implementation of the act.
Although there is an increase in submission of information about civil servants and state employees into the Central Human Resources Record, this information system of the Human Resources Management Authority, which is a key to the human resource planning in state administration, is still only partially updated. By July 1, data for 7 out of almost 13 thousand servants and employees, who fall under the scope of the law, were not submitted to the system. Institutional capacities for implementation of the new law and related by-laws are also insufficient. All the envisaged job positions in the Administrative Inspection and in the Human Resources Management Authority were not entirely filled, but only around fifty percent of them.
Delays in responses to the freedom of information requests and failures of authorities to publish the lists of their employees hinder monitoring of the law’s implementation. It is this necessary to ensure consistent implementation of the Law with regard to the recruitment and promotion in state authorities. Also, there is a need for efficient oversight of the application of the new rules, with an aim of preventing the abuses by hiring people via employment mediation agencies, which would make the obligation of testing abilities of candidates for job in state authority pointless.
The Parliamentary Committee on Education, Science, Culture and Sports failed to support the initiative of MP Srđan Perić to hold a control hearing of Minister of Education Slavoljub Stijepović about the situation in the publishing industry, in light of the findings presented in the Report of the State Audit Institution (SAI) on the audit of the 2012 Yearly Financial Report of Institute for Textbooks and Teaching Aid.
As a reminder, the Report on the audit of Institute for Textbooks and Teaching Aid contains some of the most serious critical observations and remarks ever made by SAI so far. Thanks to the SAI Report, we are now informed about serious financial mishandlings in the work of Institute for Textbooks and Teaching Aid, including more than three million Euros incorrectly presented in the Financial Report for 2012. Furthermore, SAI has found that the Institute violated numerous laws and internal regulations, including Law on Public Procurements, Law on Public Internal Financial Control System, Labour Law, etc. According to SAI estimates, uneconomic business operations of the Institute led to financial irregularities amounting to more than half of million Euros, with more than 850 000 Euros in the area of public procurements only.
This has led SAI to express conditional opinion on the Financial Report of the Institute and a negative opinion on compliance with regulations and business efficiency.
However, in spite of all the facts presented, the Committee on Education, Science, Culture and Sports found that the hearing of the representative of the Ministry in charge is unnecessary and rejected the initiative for the control hearing.
We ask the MPs who voted against the initiative of MP Perić what else, besides negative opinions and remarks presented by the SAI, was necessary to occur in order for them to become interested in the work of the consumer unit they are required to supervise? In addition, who else will deal with this issue if the Parliamentary Committee in charge failed to see it as worthy of control hearing?
Unfortunately, for too long have parliamentary committees had the practice of ignoring SAI reports on the subjects of their supervision. This is why the parliamentary oversight of the budget is underdeveloped and, in some cases, nonexistent.
Besides the Security and Defense Committee and the Committee on Economy, Finance and Budget, no other parliamentary committee dedicated a special meeting to discussing a particular SAI report.
This practice needs to stop and parliamentary committees have to start using findings of SAI as a tool for exercising parliamentary control of the budget. If SAI reports are not read and used by MPs and representatives of other monitoring bodies, there will not be much use of them.
We consider yesterday’s dismissal of initiative of Positive Montenegro devastating for the Parliament. We urge the members of the Committee on Education, Science, Culture and Sports to get this issue back on the agenda and to hold accountable those responsible for violating numerous legal provisions and for financial mishandlings detected in the work of institution over which they exercise supervision.
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European Commission says: “The plan for the reorganisation of the public sector, which had been endorsed by the government in April 2012, was finalised and adopted in July 2013. This version provides a sector analysis with a view to identifying adequate staffing levels and increasing efficiency”. It is a document Government of Montenegro has been hiding from Montenegrin public for already 4 months. Institute Alternative warned about the issue in September, but we received no official response or reaction from the Government so far.
The Parliamentary Committee on Education, Science, Culture and Sports failed to support the initiative of MP Srđan Perić to hold a control hearing of Minister of Education Slavoljub Stijepović about the situation in the publishing industry, in light of the findings presented in the Report of the State Audit Institution (SAI) on the audit of the 2012 Yearly Financial Report of Institute for Textbooks and Teaching Aid.