The people who work for the State Revenue Service (VID) are the most controlled civil servants in the country, said Director General of VID Baiba Šmite-Roķe at a press-conference on Monday, the 6th of January.
Commenting on the transfer of the investigative and operational functions of the VID Internal Security Bureau to the Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau (KNAB), the head of VID noted that there is now one less law enforcement institution in Latvia and for a small country such optimization of the structures of similar functions is considered good.
The head of VID praised the work done by the Internal Security Board thus far, as it had demonstrated the VID’s desire to “clean up”. At the same time, the small administration sometimes lacked capacity, so it needed help from another VID structure – the Tax and Customs Police Department. The capacities of those working in the administration under the auspices of KNAB will be much higher and possible corrupt cases will certainly be detected more effectively, says Šmite-Roķe.
Despite the transfer of functions to the KNAB, the VID established its Internal Control Division, which will deal with prevention, analytics and support to the KNAB if necessary.
Smite Roķe believes that so far there has been a relatively large amount of information about the violations of the VID employees, because the VID employees are the most controlled civil servants in the entire country. “They are controlled by the Internal Security Administration, by the KNAB, moreover, the declaration of state officials is also controlled as the first employees of the VID. We are the most controlled, and I think we will be, because trust can only arise among the public if there is confidence that the employees who serve the people are honest,” stressed the head of VID.
Despite the fact that the KNAB will now have to be controlled by customs officers, some of whom work in the outermost regions of the country, the head of KNAB, Jekabs Straume, pointed out that the office does not currently plan to create regional divisions, although the law gives the right to organize such divisions. In the opinion of the stream, Latvia is not so big that in a couple of hours investigators could not get to a particular place.
Complementing the statement from the head of the KNAB, Šmite-Roķe pointed out that modern technologies also allow for remote controlling measures. For example, the images scanned by customs are analysed in the main building of the VID on Talejas Street and it is possible to observe absolutely all border crossing points online. The records of camcorders are also available to the examiners for each customs officer.
Currently VID has approximately 3 000 employees.
As it is known, on the 1st of January, KNAB took over the investigative and operational functions of the VID Internal Security Department. The plan is for KNAB to become a law enforcement institution that will, among other things, investigate corrupt criminal offences committed by people employed by the VID.