In order to cope with the tasks generated by the need to align the national legislation to the European legislation, we need a larger number of employees in ministries, Elena Levinta, consultant on civil service management policy at the State Chancellery, said in a debate hosted by IPN News Agency. According to the official, the legislation will be soon amended so that the person who will manage the flow of employees within state entities will be the secretary general.
According to Elena Levinta, the legislative amendments will depoliticize the process of hiring and managing the human resources in the public system. The management of human resources will become the prerogative of the secretary general of the institution, not of the minister, who is a political appointee.
“In Parliament, there is a draft law to amend Law No. 158 on the civil service and the status of the civil servant, which assigns the role of managing the human resource in the ministry to the secretary general, as a senior management civil servant, not to the minister. These are changes that depoliticize the competition commission. Greater emphasis is placed on the secretary general, who will also head the competition commission and the disciplinary commission,” said Elena Levinta, consultant at the State Chancellery.
According to her, within a ministry, the secretary general will be the one who will fully manage the human resources. Also, each ministry will have its own competition commission for selecting employees.
“The human resource management system is a decentralized system. This means that each public authority has its own competition commission, disciplinary commission. All the processes related to human resources are managed within the authority. The minister, being a high-ranking official, appoints and dismisses employees according to the law, but the processes are managed by another civil servant, the secretary general, who is a kind of manager of the institution and ensures the correct, uniform implementation of personnel procedures,” stated Elena Levinta.
She pointed out that with the opening of the accession negotiations, the workload related to the implementation of the acquis communautaire has increased considerably. In order to attract new employees to the central public administration entities, the Government launched a program of paid internships in the civil service.
“In ministries, we have increased the number of staff considering all the challenges and tasks that follow on the EU dimension. There are quite large institutions, ANSA, CNAS, NBS, which made analyses, proposed a new structure, with a reduced number of staff, and the generated savings were redirected to increasing salaries. I want to make a call to the young people who are students. We have a paid internship program in the civil service. It is Government’s instrument for increasing the attractiveness of the civil service - internship programs in ministries. We also offer scholarships. Subsequently, they can get hired under advantageous conditions, sometimes even without a competition,” noted Elena Levinta.
The public debate entitled “Human resources crisis and salary system within Central Public Administration and Local Public Administration. Research” was staged within the initiative “Socially responsible management of external financing” of the Institute for Strategic Initiatives, in partnership with the Independent Think Tank “Expert-Grup”, with support from Soros Foundation Moldova.
