The Government’s intention to hastily abolish the Administration for Inspection Affairs is not based on adequate analyses, on exposé for the composition of the current Government and the Strategy for Public Administration Reform, and it can not be carried out without negative consequences within the stipulated short deadlines.
The information, which was discussed on January 16th, at the telephone session of the Government, with accompanying conclusions, suffers from numerous methodological flaws. They are mostly reflected in the fact that the Government does not even have the exact number of laws that need to be amended in order to decentralise inspections, although amendments are required by February 15.
In fact, the Government has largely copied the conclusions of the 2021 Analysis of the Efficiency of the Administration for Inspection Affairs, largely prepared during the Government of Dusko Markovic, which also suffers from numerous methodological shortcomings. First of all, the Analysis concluded that the centralisation of the inspection bodies into a single body, that began in 2011, was not effective and that the decentralised model enables a more efficient realisation of the responsibility of the inspection, i.e. the head of the inspection body, and also a more transparent realisation of the political responsibility of the line minister for the situation in one area.
However, this Analysis, as well as the recent Information of the Government, did not deal at all with the work of inspections that already operate within the relevant ministries, such as the Urban Planning and Construction Inspectorate or Administrative Inspectorate. In other words, the Government assumed the superiority of the decentralised model, without analysing the efficiency of the inspections that are already functioning within the line ministries. We believe that the conclusions would be significantly different if the effects of the inspections within the ministries were analysed according to the same criteria, both in terms of transparency and political responsibility.
Additionally, such a major decision is made without prior announcement in the exposé of the current prime minister, and it is impossible to implement it with the full participation of the public and interested parties, including the inspectors themselves, within a period of less than a month. Also, the Strategy for the Reform of Public Administration, which is being implemented, foresees the strengthening of the role and capacity of the Administration for Inspection Affairs, through the improvement of the normative framework, personnel capacities and the binding of registers necessary for the proactive operation of inspection supervision, rather than its abolition.
All this speaks of the absence of a strategic and grounded approach to such an important decision. Unfortunately, experience taught us that opening such a major issue in a short period of time can negatively disrupt the performance of inspection supervision and create new excuses for the lack of transparency and results, through opening of new procedures for reorganisation, taking over employees, providing accommodation facilities and access to IT infrastructure.
Milena Muk
Institute Alternative
