By the conditions imposed on the Republic of Moldova, the European Union wishes the country only good, said Veaceslav Ionita, expert of the Institute for Development and Social Initiative “Viitorul”, referring, in particular, to two of the 28 conditions set out in the memorandum of understanding between Moldova and the EU for the provision of €100 million in macro-financial assistance. One of the conditions refers to the central Government reform, while the second to the reduction in the number of permissive documents. The expert spoke about this in the public debate “Chances of fulfilling the 28 conditions for obtaining €100 million from the EU or How real is the government’s objective to make the European course irreversible until the parliamentary elections?” It was the 85th installment of the series of debates “Developing political culture by public debates” that are organized by IPN News Agency and Radio Moldova.
Veaceslav Ionita said the declared goal of the Government reform of 2003 was to come closer to the people, but the number of functionaries at mayor’s offices and in districts wasn’t increased, but was yet raised the Government. “In 2003, Moldova had a population of about 3.3 million and 15,000 functionaries. According to the last census, now the population is of 3 million, but 600,000 Moldovans live officially abroad. Thus, only 2.4 million people are on the country’s territory and the number of functionaries is of 25,000, by 10,000 more for a lower population. A functionary costs the state budget about 120,000 lei a year. The state annually loses over 1 billion lei on the inflated bureaucratic apparatus,” said the expert.
He explained that earlier the business entities spent about 400 million lei a year to get a certificate from a state institution and present it to another institution, and this referred to only five services that were recently merged into one center. The businessmen travelled from the Tax Service to the Customs Service and back as they were to get all kinds of documents. The EU intervened and asked that things should be brought in order so as to ease doing business.
The second condition imposed by the EU referred to the number of authorizations. “We liquidated the authorizations and then reduced the number of licenses and inspections and then learned that we have a lot of permissive documents. An assessment was carried out and the Europeans were shocked to find out that there were 400 permissive documents in Moldova, 300 of which were yet useless,” stated Veaceslav Ionita.
“The permissive documents were a heavy burden for businessmen, who had to gather by 300 papers from different institutions and to spend annually billions of lei. The European Union said things should be brought in order here too as we have over 6,000 services provided for money and it is not known who audits these,” said the expert.
“I consider this process will last. It is one thing when the law is amended, but it is something else to show to the EU that we want to go on swifter and to seriously fulfill our commitments. What the EU asks is not to waste about 1 billion lei on the inflated and inefficient apparatus that destroys the businesses and to reduce the administrative burden on these,” noted Veaceslav Ionita.
The public debate “Chances of fulfilling the 28 conditions for obtaining €100 million from the EU or How real is the government’s objective to make the European course irreversible until the parliamentary elections?” was the 85th installment of the series of debates “Developing political culture by public debates” that are organized with support from the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany.
