Publication of civil servants’ wages on official websites should not create a “drama”, said Director of the Latvian State Chancellery Raivis Kronbergs in an interview to LTV programme Rīta panorāma.
He allowed that “colleagues could start looking at each other with suspicion – why is my wage published and my colleagues’ isn’t”.
“This is one possibility. We already have problems with procurement commissions, where people don’t want to work, because this automatically makes them civil servants,” said the State Chancellery’s director, adding that wages of members of procurement commissions will be published.
Kronbergs said there may be a situation when people who don’t want to have their wages published will start asking for positions of other levels of responsibility. “But there should not be a drama,” believes the Director of the State Chancellery.
He also said that the State Audit has presented the State Chancellery the task of developing guidelines for the procedure for publishing foreign missions.
“Missions for Q1 – January, February, March – will be published in April,” said Kronbergs.
As previously reported, that the State Chancellery has developed draft Cabinet regulations stipulating that the information published by the institution regarding the remuneration calculated for an official in the previous month will be available on the website for one month – until the next information on the remuneration calculated for the official is published. The regulation will apply to all institutions under the State Administration Structure Law.
The calculated remuneration will be published for civil servants under the interpretation of the State Administration Structure Law, i.e. for natural persons who are authorised to take or prepare an administrative decision in general or in a particular case.
As noted in the annotation to the project, it will be the responsibility of the head of each institution to determine which employees – civil servants and employees – are generally or, in a particular case, authorised to take or prepare an administrative decision within the institution concerned and for which remuneration should be published.
Institutions will have to publish “calculated” (gross) remuneration on the website. At the same time, the annotation to the draft regulation indicates that if an official is absent for a long time and has not been paid remuneration for the relevant month, then his name, surname, position will not have to be published. It will also reduce the risk of processing the officer’s sensitive data, the annotation notes.
The estimated remuneration to be published on the website will include a monthly salary, bonuses, bonuses and cash prizes, but will not include benefits.