BRATISLAVA, November 19, (WEBNOVINY) — An analysis submitted by the Finance Ministry to the Parliamentary Finance Committee states that according to the Customs Directorate, reducing its staff by more than 850 will not affect the performance of customs administration. Opposition MP Peter Kazimir (SMER-SD) however does not consider the one-and-half page document to be an analysis and demanded it to be rewritten. “The Ministry’s letter writing that the collection of taxes and custom duties cannot be endangered is absolutely unsatisfactory for me,” Kazimir said at a session of the Parliamentary Finance Committee this Thursday. Eventually, the Ministry withdrew the analysis and will submit it again after it is rewritten.
According to Kazimir, it is not true that the Customs Directorate did not reduce its staff in recent years. This was done in stages; one thousand people have left the customs service from 2005 to 2010. “During five years the number [of customs officers] was cut by thousand people and now you want to cut it by 854 people in six months,” Kazimir says. The Ministry of Finance and the Customs Directorate claim that such reduction of employees within the customs administration is possible among others because of centralization of certain activities and the electronization of processes within the customs administration. According to the Finance Ministry State Secretary Branislav Durajka, electronization of these processes took place already during the reign of the previous government. However, no adequate staff reduction followed. He says that recent staff reduction is only a logical consequence of previous actions.
Maria Machova, head of the Customs Directorate rejects the criticism that these are non-systemic job cuts in the customs administration only for the sake of reducing the number of employees. “We approached individual regions in a much differentiated way according to the role of every region in the tax and customs field. We analyzed the work of every customs administration employee. We foremost took steps to make the management of customs duty administration more effective,” she stated at the committee session adding that not the executive branch of customs administration was subject of major job cuts.
Customs officers will above all feel the saving within the budget chapter of the Ministry of Finance. Approximately one-fifth of them should lose their jobs. Until the end of March 2011 the number of customs administration employees should be cut by over 850, which means by approximately 19 percent.
SITA