Grades of state employees for previous year do not reflect their actual performance, as demonstrated by the case of Administration for Prevention of Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism, whose all employees, without exception, were assessed as excellent.
Law on civil servants and state employees and the Decree regulating their performance appraisal envisage continuous monitoring of civil servants and state employees performance and issuing decisions on their grades until January 31 of the following year.
However, the relevant Decree was adopted with delay and entered into force only in July 2013, what had a negative effect on quality of performance appraisal.
Institute Alternative (IA) has asked decisions on grades of civil servants and state employees from five authorities: Agency for Environmental Protection, Legislative Secretariat, Administration for Prevention of Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism, Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Culture, in order to gain insight into the implementation of the new acts regulating the field.
Requests for access to these information were sent on February 11, 2014. We still have not received the answer from the Ministry of Culture, while Agency for Environmental Protection and Ministry of Interior have not brought all decisions on performance appraisal within the legally prescribed deadline.
According to the information obtained, most of the civil servants and state employees, apart from the Ministry of Interior, were assessed as “excellent”. In that respect, the most notorious example is the one of Administration for Prevention of Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism. Performance of all servants and employees in this Administration was assessed as “excellent”, even the work of the senior managerial staff, which should be graded only as “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory”.
Ministry of Interior, however, is exemption, since the largest number of its employees, 226 of them, received average grade, and not the excellent one. Performance of even two employees was assessed as not satisfactory, what opens possibility for them to be left without the job if their performance doesn’t improve.
All analyzed decisions are superficial and they don’t offer detailed explanation of the manner in which performance appraisal has been conducted.
In other words, although the Law and the Decree prescribe criteria and benchmarks for performance appraisal in detail, it is impossible to determine the basis for final frade from decisions which were obtained by IA.
Milena MILOŠEVIĆ
Policy Analyst
