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.
Milena MILOŠEVIĆ
Policy Analyst
