Considering the share of the public sector in the overall employment of Montenegro, the expenses for employees’ salaries, and poor human resource planning, one of the main challenges of the public administration reform would be its optimisation. This is the conclusion from the panel discussion organized by Institute Alternative.
The purpose of the event was to open a space for the discussion of civil servants and civil society representatives dealing with HR issues and HR planning at the level of public administration, given the current context of public administration reform.
It was also concluded that optimisation should not be exclusively viewed as reducing the number of employees, but rather finding better efficiency in providing administrative services and better policies.
The share of the public sector in the overall employment in Montenegro is 10% more than in the average in OECD countries. The last annual report of the State Audit Institution showed that the expenditure for salaries of public sector employees in the course of 2016 has been 11% higher than the limits defined by the Macroeconomic and Fiscal Policies Guidelines.
Decision makers are left too much room for discretionary decision-making in adopting new acts and amending existing ones on the internal organisation of administrative bodies, which is not based on human resources planning.
The Panel also discussed the internal procedures of the Human Resources Management Authority in adopting Opinion on the Proposed Rules for Internal Organization and Systematization of Public Administration Bodies, as well as the extent of the negative opinions of the Human Resources Management Authority on these acts.
Human resource plans must include the analysis of new job profiles, as well as those which are not needed any more, in order to establish a clear link between human resource planning and reorganization in the administration. As it was concluded at the panel, this is necessary in order to reduce the space for arbitrary reorganisation and legal uncertainty of employees in the administration.
The panel discussion was held within the framework of the project “Civil Society for Good Governance: To Act and Account!” financially supported by the European Union within the Civil Society Facility Program and the Balkan Trust for Democracy project, the German Marshall Fund USA (GMF) project.
