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Our Administration: Transparent Interviews – Key to Integrity of Recruitment in Public Administration

In order to improve the undermined trust in recruitment procedures in public administration, we call on the Government to improve the transparency of conducting interviews with candidates for positions in the state administration and the local self-governments.

Implementation of the new Law on Civil Servants and State Employees starts from 1st July, and it will to a large degree be properly applied to the local level.

Drafting of a key bylaw – a decree regulating testing procedures for future state and local officials, is underway.

According to the latest draft version of this act, results of testing procedures will to a greatest degree influence selection of cadre, and when scoring results of testing procedures, results from the oral interview will account for 30%. Holding of structured interviews is also foreseen for candidates for senior management positions (eg, secretaries, general directors in ministries) and heads of authorities.

We believe that, in particular for higher positions, it is necessary to provide reliable evidence of a conducted interview, which will in many cases have a decisive role in recruiting new cadre.

We remind that citizens do not trust that competences are a key criterion for employment in public administration.

On the contrary, according to the results of the public opinion survey conducted by the Ipsos Agency for Institute Alternative in February 2018, citizens believe that employment in public administration is most commonly done through friends and family (62%) and political (56%) connections.

Hence, we call on the Government and the competent Ministry of Public Administration to provide audio recording of interviews in the application of the new legal framework, because without an evidence of a conducted interview in the form of an audio recording, which should be presented to all candidates as a precondition for holding the interview, integrity of the testing procedure will remain questionable.

Also, bearing in mind the importance of professionalization of senior management and heads of authorities, who are also public officials, it is necessary to provide full transparency in the recruitment procedures for these positions.

In this regard, we recommend establishment of a practice of proactively publishing minutes from conducted interviews with candidates for the most important positions in public administration.

Representatives of Our Administration network members:

Stevo Muk, President of the Managing Board, Institute Alternative
Daliborka Uljarević, Executive Director, Centre for Civil Education
Ana Novaković, Executive Director, Center for the Development of Non-Governmental Organisations
Nazif Velić, Executive Director, New Horizon
Milka Tadić – Mijović, President of the Center for Investigative Journalism of Montenegro
Mikan Medenica, Executive Director, Natura
Mirsala Tomić, President, Association for the Development of Civil Society
Marina Vuksanović, President, NADA – Herceg Novi
Milena Đurović – Stanojević, Executive Director, Active Zone
Mustafa Canka, Executive Director, Ul info
Aleksandra Pavićević, Executive Director, Association of Youth with Disabilities of Montenegro
Slobodan Franeta, President, the Lucha Institute
Maja Raičević, Executive Director, Women’s Rights Center
Ljiljana Raičević, President, Women’s Safe House
Marta Anđelić, President, Adria

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Toward a better administration in Montenegro: Good progress or modest preparation?

This report provides an overview of the situation in the key areas of public administration reform in Montenegro. It presents new information related to the implementation of this important reform, which we first reviewed in the report titled “Public administration reform: How far is 2020?” from June 2017.

The first half of the implementation term of the 2016-2020 Public Administration Reform Strategy (PAR Strategy) was marked by slow implementation of the activities, mainly reduced to regulatory amendments and drafting of analyses. The activities that were supposed to lead to greater citizen participation in decision-making, electronic data exchange in the delivery of administrative services and more managerial accountability through delegation of authorities did not get implemented within the set timeline. In addition to the objectives and activities included in the Strategy, amendments to the Law on State Administration were adopted, relieving the state authorities of the obligation to conduct public consultations on the public policies from the fields of defence and security and annual budget, or in emergency, urgent or unforeseeable circumstances, or “when a law does not regulate an issue in an essentially different manner”. This sustained the trend of taking action, which - in spite of the strategic framework aspiring to a more open administration – amounted to regression in certain areas.

In principle, no substantial progress has been made in the public administration reform, while regression has been noted in the regulation of public debates and free access to information. The level of citizens’ trust remained unchanged in 2017 and 2018. A considerable share of our recommendations refers to deletion of recent legal provisions, rather than improvement of practices – this is a true reflection of the course of public administration reform since the adoption of the new Strategy in 2016.

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Municipalities in Trial: Between Lack of Accountability and Protection of Local Interests

The subject of this study is the protection of property rights at the local level in Montenegro.

Just like the central state, local governments appear before courts more frequently as defendants than as plaintiffs. The most frequent type of charges brought against them involve work-related rights. These can also be dealt with via mediation, but information on the number of mediation cases or settlements in work-related disputes is not proactively published. Data privacy rules did not allow us to get the municipal level information from the Agency for peaceful settlement of labour disputes. Overall, there is little transparency in this area: reports on the work of municipal bodies in charge of legal representation and protection of property are not proactively published.

In the upcoming period, Ministry of Finance should regulate the rules for reporting on spending on court-related nes and insist on uni ed and transparent presentation of amounts budgeted for court-related costs as a condition for the Ministry’s approval of local self-governments’ budget decisions. This could be accomplished by amending Regulations on the single classi cation of accounts for the Budget of Montenegro, budgets of extra-budgetary funds and budgets of municipalities. Local self-governments should regularly published analytical cards, and municipal bodies in charge of representation and protection ought to proactively publish report son their work, and inform the relevant authorities in local self-governments about the state of court disputes in order to ensure timely initiation of negotiations with plaintiffs and more frequent use of alternative settlement procedures. State Audit Institution ought to conduct a thematic audit of expenses incurred through court proceedings by all local self-governments.