Public administration reform • 16. 05. 2025.

Delays in Staffing Planning at the State Level Have Become Standard Practice

As many as 92% of state administration bodies and government services in Montenegro have not yet prepared staffing plans for 2025. Out of 52 government bodies and services, only four have fulfilled their legal obligation and submitted draft staffing plans to the Human Resources Administration.

This information was stated in the official Report on the Implementation of the Staffing Planning Mechanism in State Administration Bodies and Government Services of Montenegro, prepared by the Human Resources Administration and adopted by the Government at the end of March this year.

According to the law, staffing plans must be adopted within 30 days of the adoption of the state budget. The 2025 budget was adopted on 7 February this year.

The staffing plan provides an overview of the number of state officials and employees on permanent and temporary contracts, the number of those who will meet the conditions for retirement, as well as the number of planned new hires for that year. It is important to emphasize that a staffing plan is a prerequisite for initiating any recruitment procedure, since a decision to fill a position can only be made if that position is included in the staffing plan.
Exceptionally, if a position is not included in the plan, the law stipulates that recruitment may be carried out only after obtaining the Government’s approval.

Under the Law on State Officials and Employees, state administration bodies and government services are obliged to prepare draft staffing plans and obtain the consent of the Ministry of Finance. Based on these drafts, the Human Resources Administration prepares a proposal for the annual staffing plan for the entire state administration.

The Government’s conclusion of 27 March this year confirms that the exact number of employees that ministries and administrative bodies plan to hire, as well as the number of those eligible for retirement, will remain unknown for some time.
By this conclusion, the Government instructed all ministries and other administrative bodies to submit draft staffing plans for 2025 within 30 days of adopting their internal acts on organization and systematization, aligned with the Law on State Officials and Employees, which is currently in parliamentary procedure.

Despite the obligation to adopt staffing plans within one month of the budget’s adoption, staffing plans have been delayed for years. In recent years, the Government has not managed to prepare a consolidated staffing plan for the entire state administration; instead, only partial plans have been adopted for certain bodies and services, and these have typically been updated at least twice during the year following the adoption of the first version.
For some bodies, staffing plans for 2024 were adopted only in the last quarter of the same year, undermining the very purpose of the staffing planning mechanism.
The Ministry of Interior stands out in this regard, as it has failed to prepare a staffing plan for the past four years—something we have repeatedly pointed out.

We have previously analysed the persistent delays in staffing plan adoption, the limited scope of existing plans, and the weak link between staffing and budgetary planning in our 2021 study “Budgetary and Staffing Planning: Another Name for Optimization”, whose findings and recommendations remain relevant today.

Dragana Jaćimović
Institute Alternative