The Government needs to sack 200,000 state staff until 2011 to follow IMF requests

The number of state employees needs to drop by approximately 200,000 staff by 2011 in order for the salary increase to be sustainable and because the GDP share for state incomes must drop to 6.7% from over 8% (2008), according to Romania press agency NewsIn, quoting governmental sources.

Government officials said that the number of personnel hired by the state needs to drop 5-6 percents each year to 2011, according to the IMF agreement. Another option is lower incomes, but this is less likely to happen.

„The number of state staff needs to be reduced yearly by 60.000 – 70.000 employees to reach a correct ratio between those working for the state and those working in the private sector”, the sources added. In the event that there will be no staff this year, 2010 and 2011 will have to see viable solutions that will reduce state employees by approximately 200,000, the sources mentioned.

The sources said that the sacking will have to happen eventually, because otherwise Romania will not receive the money from the IMF. The government plans to introduce annual or bi-annual examinations, so that the system would not lose the best employees.

There is a big resistance from the public sector against the new technology. „They know that if Romanians paid all their taxes via internet, they will lose their jobs. There are interests making the computer network modernisation, for example, to be useless”, governmental sources said.

The technical memorandum featured by the IMF agreement anticipates a decrease in the GDP allowance for state incomes from 8.6% (2008) to 7.8% in 2009 to 7.2% in 2010 and 6.7% in 2011. The document reads the Government already cancelled 137,000 vacancies in the state department, a measure used to increase the incomes of the existent staff.

According to the agreement, the Executive decided to limit budget spending through „cancelling salary increase in the state sector (a total of 5%) planned for 2009 or through an equivalent reduction of the number of employees” and through „decreasing the number of state employees in the state sector”.

The number of employees counted 4,623,900 employees, out of which 1,404,600 were working in the state department at the end of April, according to the National Statistics Institute data.