Arrangements regarding the acceleration of the staff recruitment process in the public sector, through the Supreme Personnel Selection Council (ASEP) and the staffing of public services in specific regions of the country, introduces a draft law of the Ministry of the Interior submitted to the Parliament.

With the draft law “Acceleration of recruitment through A.S.E.P., amendments to the Code of Status of Public Political Administrative Employees and N.P.D.D. Employees. and in the Code of Status of Municipal and Community Employees, incentive and reward system for public employees, regulations for the evaluation system of public employees and other provisions for improving the operation of the public administration” amendments are made to Law 4765/2021 on the recruitment system in the public sector , the main ones of which concern:

– scoring increment due to the locality of candidate public officials in insular, mountainous and mainland municipalities of the country,

– the possibility of assigning a number to each candidate per announcement, through the application of open lottery software, in order to determine the order of their ranking,

– carrying out the entire process of filling staff positions with an employment relationship i.d.o.h., through a central electronic platform for submitting applications and supporting documents, which is developed and managed by the Ministry of the Interior.

According to what the explanatory report states, “the understaffing of public services, especially in mountainous, island municipalities, as well as the delays observed in the completion of recruitment and appointment procedures, make the promoted interventions necessary to motivate candidates from vulnerable areas, to to strengthen the development of local societies and at the same time to immediately fill the vacancies of public services”.

The draft law that will be submitted to the competent parliamentary committee for processing within the week provides for:

– filling of the positions of the annual recruitment planning for the years 2022 and 2023 as well as 2024 and 2025 by successful candidates of the pan-Hellenic written competition of the 2C/2022 call/announcement or another subsequent written examination, based on the defined criteria.

– amendment/supplementation of provisions of the Code of Status of Public Political Administrative Servants (n. 3528/2007) and of the Code of Status of Municipal and Community Servants (n. 3584/2007), with the aim of shortening the individual deadlines provided for and the consequent acceleration of the completion of procedure for appointing public and municipal officials

– Redefinition, with application from the year 2025, of the framework regarding the incentive and reward system for public service employees, linked to the target setting and evaluation system of Law 4940/2022, with the aim of achieving specified goals and measurable results and corresponding remuneration of the employees involved. At the same time, Article 23 of Law 4940/2022 is repealed. Specifically, the following are defined:

– the scope of the incentive and reward system of civil servants [μόνιμοι πολιτικοί υπάλληλοι, υπάλληλοι με σχέση εργασίας ι.δ.α.χ., στρατιωτικοί των Ενόπλων Δυνάμεων και το ένστολο προσωπικό των Σωμάτων Ασφαλείας, οι οποίοι υλοποιούν συγκεκριμένους στόχους του Ενοποιημένου Σχεδίου Κυβερνητικής Πολιτικής (Ε.Σ.Κυ.Π.).],

– the conditions for entities and employees to be included in the incentive and reward system, where it is explicitly mentioned that the payment of the reward is suspended in case of criminal or disciplinary proceedings, while it is paid retroactively in case of final acquittal or discharge of the employee,

– the procedure to be followed for determining the targets eligible for reward, the calculation of the final reward amount per eligible entity and the payment of the reward per eligible employee.

Recommended to the Ministry of the Interior:

– Incentives and Rewards Committee, to coordinate the implementation of the incentives and rewards system and determine its responsibilities and composition,

– Department of Incentives and Rewards, with the task of managing the incentive and reward system and providing assistance to the above Committee.

Furthermore, an Incentive and Reward Information System is being developed and operating at the Ministry of Interior, which is interoperable with the systems that support evaluation and targeting as well as with the “Public Administration Human Resource Management System” (PSMS), after the latter’s placement in productive function.

As noted in the explanatory statement, the proposed arrangements respond to the need to provide a single incentive to civil servants in order to demonstrate greater dedication and speed in the performance of their duties and to help achieve specific set objectives, ultimately contributing to the more effective and efficient operation of the unit in which they serve. “Employee motivation is one of the most important management issues, since it is closely related to human behavior and performance in the workplace. In fact, the more attractive the incentives are, the more the employees’ efforts for any kind of reward intensify. Already today, special employee targeting and reward systems have been established and implemented in individual bodies, such as the Electronic Unified Social Security Agency, some Regulatory Independent Authorities and the Greek Land Registry. The new reward system is aimed at agencies with different forms, different responsibilities, different clients and has been created in such a way that it can be extended to other agencies in the future, as it is simple without difficult or specialized types of application resulting from very specialized or difficult to data to be produced”, the explanatory statement notes. It is also stated that the following practices of EU member states, such as France, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, but also of other OECD countries, such as the United Kingdom and Canada, were taken into account in terms of targeting and evaluation, the parties involved, the incentive criteria, the weighting factors of the criteria, the levels of the rewards, the way of awarding the rewards, the stages of evaluation control.

With the draft law, the following are redefined: i. the scope of Law 4940/2022, ii. the time frame for determining the target location of the agencies, and the possibility of using technological tools and electronic applications is provided by the Supervisory Evaluation Committee of the agency for the implementation of its work.

Provisions on Staff State (n. 4622/2019) are amended, by shortening the deadline for approval of the Unified Government Policy Plan as well as the individual deadlines set during the planning of the government project.

Issues related to:

– recognition of the relevance of a master’s degree in case of employee transfer,

– commissioning of the information system entitled “Human Resources Management System of the Public Administration” (HRMS), in which all the data and functions of the Human Resources Registry of the Greek State, of which HRMS is the successor, are transferred.

Reassignment of municipal employees who have already been allocated through an inter-municipal cooperation agreement to a contracting municipality, for the provision of home assistance services, is permitted.