The reform of the public administration has been implemented half-heartedly, and the main reason that the citizens still do not have a professional and efficient public administration is that the key laws have not been adopted - for employees in the public sector, for administrative officers, as well as the law for the senior management service, states the State Audit Office. In the Report on the success of the reform of the administration, the problem is stated that the reorganization of the state bodies is delayed, that the planned activities are not fully implemented, and that there is not enough professional staff.

- According to the new methodology for accession to the EU, public administration reform is an area that is part of the negotiation process in the Fundamental Values ​​cluster, so the SAO performed the audit to answer the question of whether the activities undertaken by the competent institutions ensure the efficient implementation of the Strategy for reform of the public administration 2018-2022 - say the SAO.

Reading the report forces the answer to be "no".

The audit states that the procedure for the three key laws began in 2019, but they have not yet been voted on - with the pandemic at the beginning of 2020, the dissolution of the Parliament and the early elections, the process for legal amendments was put on hold, and in September the new minister of MIOA decided that instead of amendments, new laws will be passed. The proposals of the law on administrative officers and the law on public sector employees were submitted to ENER in September 2021, but even after a whole year they have not been submitted to the Government to continue the procedure.

- The purpose of passing a law on senior management service is to distinguish the political from the professional level and to determine the lines of accountability of senior managers. The wear goes at a slow pace. At the end of 2019, the Government submitted the law to the Parliament, in November 2020 it was withdrawn, and in May 2022 MIOA announced that it would start preparing a new draft law, which until the day of the audit was not submitted to ENER - the audit report said.

DRZ states that a big problem is the frequent appointment of acting directors, with 2018 percent of the total number of appointed directors being acting directors from 2021 to 52. directors or acting deputies.

- Their election is without publication of a public announcement, which affects the professionalization of the senior management service, the good management in the institutions of the public sector and reduces the accountability of the procedure for the selection of managers of the institutions - state the auditors.

The holder of the Administration Reform Strategy is the Ministry of Information Society and Administration, and the auditors determined that this Ministry has no documentation on how the strategy was developed because it is not part of the MIOA archive. The persons who managed this process are no longer employed by MIOA, so no institutional memory for the process is provided.

– A revised action plan for the implementation of the strategy was adopted, with which changes were made to a third of the planned activities, new activities were defined, changes were made to the implementation deadlines and performance measurement indicators, and the amount of planned money was reduced. Frequent changes in personnel capacities to fulfill the reform goals and insufficient staffing were determined - the report says.

In the Council for Reform of Public Administration, which is the highest political body for the coordination of activities from 2018 to 2022, six changes were made in its composition, as a result of the constant structural changes in the Government. In four years, the Council held only seven meetings, the last one in July 2021.

- The total money planned for the implementation of the Strategy amounts to about 30 million euros, with the largest share, over 56 percent, provided by EU funds and instruments. Out of a total of 205 planned activities, only 106 were realized, which represents 52 percent realization. There is no transparency, accountability and monitoring of the spent money from the state budget, because apart from MIOA, other institutions have not opened a special sub-program within the government program for administration reform.

MIOA does not have systematized records for each activity of the strategy, and in the half-yearly and annual reports there is no data on planned and realized funds. The fourth annual report from 2021 does not contain a complete financial review and an analysis is given only of spent funds in the amount of about 18 million euros, which is 61 percent of the total planned money for the period 2018-2022 - the auditors state, among other things.