Commission Report 2002 (Slovakia)

The executive

With regard to the development of ``self-administration'', which is a key element of public administration reform in Slovakia, in December 2001 the first elections for the regional parliaments and regional governments took place. Voter turnout was extremely low (under 25%). The elections were widely won by the Opposition.

The Law on the Public Service and the Law on the Civil Service, aiming at creating a professional, impartial, politically neutral, efficient and flexible civil and public service, entered into force in April 2002. The key institution responsible for the implementation of the latter, the Civil Service Office, was set up in March 2002. Its functions range from recruitment, training and information to preparing secondary legislation. According to the original schedule, the Office, jointly with a number of other ministries, was to have developed secondary legislation for the implementation of the Civil Service Law prior to its entry into force. However, the creation of the Office was delayed, because the Government took a long time to agree on a candidate for the post of chairperson. As a result, the necessary secondary legislation is not fully in place, which has hampered implementation of the Civil Service Law. Out of the planned office staff of 60 persons, so far only half of them have been recruited. It is important to remedy this situation, so that the Civil Service Office can play its vital role in implementing the Civil Service Law. Moreover, the recruitment of new civil servants in general has been delayed, as the relevant steering committees could not be set up in time due to legal obstacles. An amendment to the Civil Service Law, however, has remedied this situation.

Furthermore, the necessary management tools and co-ordination mechanisms need to be developed, in particular the new salary scheme needs to be transposed into carefully designed implementing regulations to ensure adequate criteria and transparent procedures for the attribution of individual salaries. Also, there is a need to structure and intensify training activities in the public sector.

In a positive development, codes of ethics for civil servants and employees in the public administration were adopted.

The Law on Free Access to Information has been further implemented. In the year 2001, altogether 8 101 requests were submitted to different ministries. Whereas awareness among the population has been increased, uniform treatment by administrative bodies of documents considered to be secret appears to remain a problem.

The Government has continued to implement the results of the state audit approved in 2000. Amongst others, more than 100 ministerial departments and five budgetary organisations were abolished and a further eight organisations have had their public funding cut off.

The Government's plan to increase the number of staff dealing with EU integration has largely been implemented according to schedule. Out of the additional 833 staff foreseen for 2002, so far around 500 have been recruited. In August 2002, the Government decided to further increase staff in this sector by around 700 people in the year 2003.

Following the elections, representative bodies were appointed. Work started towards building up regional administrations and electing specialist committees. There were complaints about over-politicisation of this process, at the risk of losing wel-qualified staff from the existing regional offices. As pointed out in last year's Regular Report, a first set of functions has been transferred to the regions, including the management of civil registers, cultural institutions, education and some social services. The ambitious schedule envisages the completion of the transfer by the beginning of 2004. However, despite the legal changes reported on last year, the transfer of functions has not yet satisfactorily gone hand in hand with fiscal decentralisation, jeopardising the timely and proper functioning of a democratic, efficient and sustainable self-administration.

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