Radovan Ďurana z INESS komentoval pre The
Slovak Spectator dňa 25.1. 2010 zlučovanie ministerstiev ako ho navrhla vláda.
Ako povedal, skutočnosť, že vláda nedokáže vyčísliť úspory zo vzniku týchto
inštitúcií poukazuje na fakt, že tomuto kroku nepredchádzala dôsledná analýza
podložená auditom ich činností a zdrojov. V súkromnej sfére nikdy nedochádza k
fúziám bez tohto kroku.
THE TRIMMING of state administration bureaucracy has
started, heralds the government of Prime Minister Robert Fico. The government
plans to close up the stand-alone Ministries of Environment, and Construction
and Regional Development, merge the former with the Ministry of Agriculture,
then toss in the regional development duties from the latter and create a new
Ministry for Agriculture, Environment and Regional Development.
Under other parts of the Prime Minister’s grand plan, the
tourism functions will move to the Ministry of Culture and the Economy Ministry
will assume the construction-related functions of the Ministry of Construction
and Regional Development. And to top it off, all authority related to drawing
EU funds will be placed in the hands of the Slovak Cabinet Office.
The Slovak parliament has already said yes to the plan in a
fast-tracked legislative procedure which took place on January 20.
However, this does not mean that the current government of
Prime Minister Robert Fico will have to walk the walk, since the reshuffling
approved now, a few months before June’s parliamentary elections, will take
effect only under the next government.
Prime Minister Fico dubbed the trimming plan “fantastic” but
it seems that there are several groups which, for a number of reasons, do not
share his enthusiasm. Environmental organisations, ecologists and civic
activists are protesting against scrapping the Ministry of Environment, saying
that the merger plan reveals that the current government simply does not
understand environmental policies and the importance of protecting nature. The
Slovak Governance Institute has initiated a petition against the elimination of
the stand-alone environment ministry.
Fico said that the plan can save the state about €13.28
million annually but the draft that was submitted to parliament did not provide
exact figures on potential savings.
Several observers said that Fico is rushing into this
mega-merger without proper preparations and that in the end the savings might
not be that significant.
“The fact that the
government is unable to calculate the savings from the rise of these
institutions points to the fact that this step has not been preceded by an
in-depth analysis supported by an audit of their activities and resources,”
Radovan Ďurana of the Institute of Economic and Social Studies (INESS) told The
Slovak Spectator. “In the private sector there is no merger without that move
being undertaken.”
The largest opposition party, the Slovak Democratic and
Christian Union (SDKÚ), called the cabinet’s plan deceitful, populist and
incorrect.
The trimming plan was announced shortly after Fico yielded
to truckers who organised massive protests against the electronic highway toll
collection system launched on January 1. The truckers demanded cuts in the
excise tax on diesel fuel, toll charges to be lifted from first class roads
until the sections are fairly divided, reduction in fines for incorrectly
installed onboard monitoring units, and signs to be erected by the end of June
which clearly mark the tolled sections of first class roads.
Parliament has already approved the cabinet’s draft
amendment to the law on excise tax which cuts the tax on diesel fuel from
€0.481 per litre to €0.368 per litre as of February. The final price of diesel
at filling stations is expected to drop 13 cents per litre after the tax cut
becomes effective, the SITA newswire wrote.
Ďurana, however,
considers this merger of ministries at the same time as a reduction of the
excise tax on diesel as a simultaneous flow of two separate events, rather than
as causally linked.
Ďurana said he
believed other ministries could be more profitably merged, for instance the
Education and Culture Ministries, or the Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs and
Family with the Health Ministry.
“The number of
ministries is needlessly high and should be reduced to a greater degree,”
Ďurana told The Slovak Spectator.
Ďurana said that in
2010 it will be possible to tap only minimal savings from this initiative due
to the transitional costs of the mergers and also because of severance payments
to employees. He added that the estimates of €10-13 million in savings that
have been published have not been professionally supported.
“Considering the
minimal savings thus far with the project of the reduction of state
administration through transformation of regional offices, we are sceptical
also regarding these declared savings, which are far from covering the possible
shortfall of tax revenues from the cut in the excise tax on diesel,” Ďurana
said.
According to Finance Ministry officials, the revenue
shortfall from the reduced excise tax could range between nothing and €100
million, as it is possible that part of the shortfall from the tax decrease
could be covered by higher consumption of diesel. However, Ďurana said consumption would need to increase by 31 percent
to compensate for the tax reduction.
“If the government
does not want to finance the shortfall by future debt it would have to achieve
savings by laying off approximately 5,600 state employees or by making
legislative changes to reduce the volume of so-called mandatory expenses, such
as child bonuses or the housing-saving bonus,” said Ďurana.
Under what
circumstances Ďurana would view cuts to the state administration to be
effective, he said that the process would require two levels: the first is
preserving the current output of the state administration at lower costs,
meaning savings in personnel and operational costs; and the second, higher
level, in his opinion, is a systematic review and reduction of state activities
which would make possible more significant savings through, for example, the
reduction of tasks done by the state that market entities could perform.
“However, reduction
of mandatory expenses such as providing state bonuses to construction-saving
products, which cannot be called anything other than wasting of taxpayers’
money, also belong here,” Ďurana said.
By taking such an
approach to merging the ministries, Ďurana opined that not only higher savings
in public administration could be achieved but also more benefits for the
citizens of Slovakia.
The political context
Both the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of
Construction and Regional Development have been in the hands of Ján Slota’s
Slovak National Party (SNS) since 2006, until the Environment Ministry was taken
away from the SNS in August 2009 in the aftermath of the scandal over the sale
of Slovakia’s excess emission quotas to a US-based garage firm called Interblue
Group.
The Ministry of Construction and Regional Development was
responsible for the now infamous bulletin-board tender which sent €119 million
in EU funds to a consortium of firms, including two, Zamedia and Avocat,
believed to be close to Slota.
Marek Maďarič, the deputy chairman of Smer and current
culture minister, rejected claims that the proposal to merge these two
ministries with others is related to these major scandals and other
questionable dealings that arose in these ministries in past years, SITA wrote.
“No, it is not related to that,” Madarič told a political
debate programme broadcast by the public service Slovak Television (STV).
The
Slovak Spectator, 25 Jan 2010 Beata
Balogová
