The plan of actions to reduce the practice of informal employment and wages, approved by the Government on June 22, has praiseworthy goals, but difficult to achieve. This is the conclusion of an analysis by Valeriu Prohnitchi, executive director of Expert-Grup Center, Info-Prim Neo reports. According to Valeriu Prohtnitchi, the authors of the initiative failed to understand that informal employment and wages weren’t the main problem, but the effect of employers’ and workers’ response to the high costs of running a business and of the general unhappiness at how the state performed its social duties. The reduction of these phenomena is possible only on long-term, if people’s trust in the Government improves and formal business costs drop. Valeriu Prohnitchi spoke about the Turkish, who spent one year to compile 40 pages of analysis in order to define informal economy, to measure the seriousness of the phenomenon, to find its causes and consequences. Only after better understanding the situation, the Turkish government developed a coherent plan of actions, in which coercive actions were balanced by a campaign of public information and education. This approach was way different and better than the Moldovan hotheadedness, says the author. “What about information and education in Moldova? Poor! The plan has only one goal in this regard: “Promoting policies of legal literacy for employees” and includes two actions: to publicize negative consequences of informal salaries (as if Moldovans are that stupid they don’t understand this means lower pensions and no paid holidays) and to make known the cases of companies that used such practices (I wonder if, after the cases of Moldtelecom, Metal Feros and Franzeluta, there are any companies that care about the public opinion). There’s no deadline set for this goal and no clear cost of actions or budget, but there are five institutions responsible for its implementation. Here you have the well-known ingredients for the failure of a Moldovan planning document”, declared Prohnitchi. According to the expert, the Ministry of Labor, Social Protection and Family showed a primitive vision of the phenomenon of informal employment. Obviously, it has negative consequences and must be minimized, while untaxed wages are even worse and have to be eliminated. Still, the Government must use a cost vs. benefit analysis and realize the risks of such a plan, noted the Expert-Grup director. The plan of actions to reduce informal employment and wages was approved by the Government on June 22. Its goals are to increase the ratio of registered wages and to fight negative phenomena of double accounting and informal employment and wages.