Back to school

Prime Minister Leszek Miller has ruled that the controversial appointees at the Agency for Restructuring and Modernization of Agriculture (ARiMA) must pass the required tests for them to be able to authorize European Union projects within three months. If they don't, they will be sacked. Maybe Miller also needs a few lessons. First, it is a customary employment practice to check the credentials of potential appointees before - not after - they're hired. Second, if the employees do not pass the exams and are fired, they will file for unfair dismissal (since passing these exams was not a condition for getting the jobs), and will likely win. Third, those who the Peasants Party (PSL) fired in order to get the unqualified people into jobs will rightly sue for unfair dismissal as well. The upshot of all this will be lots of chaos and considerable expense for the public purse. It really would not be a bad idea for some of Poland's rulers to take a course in the frugal management of public assets. It might also be a good idea if the government would be so kind and remember some of its election promises. I well remember how Miller and his party promised us that they would deal with the wasting of public money and rationalize the scores of state agencies and funds. Faced with such a tight budgetary situation, they really should need little encouragement. The case for serious surgery is very strong.

In the rural sector alone we find severe cases of "foot in mouth" in all the agencies: " Public auditors at the Supreme Board of Inspection (NIK) have accused the State Agricultural Land Agency (AWRSP) of having cost the national treasury millions of złotys by allowing the siphoning off of money from land sales by companies in which it was a majority shareholder. Despite the fact that these companies were making up to 400% profit on land transactions by turning agricultural land into construction sites, most of them have managed to report losses. " The State Agricultural Markets Agency (ARR) has been blamed for mishandling the intervention on the grain market. Hordes of angry farmers having to wait in line for days to sell their grain is not good news for any administration. " ARiMA has come under fire for its inadequate preparation for using EU funds, its failure to set up the required monitoring system necessary for Poland's farmers to benefit from direct payments and its inept preparation for administering the EU's SAPARD pre-accession funding program.

Back in May of this year, there were reports that Interior Minister Krzysztof Janik was campaigning within the government for killing off many of the state agencies and special funds. These public bodies, better known as "quangos" in the Anglophile world, have come under increasing criticism for wasting public money. The fashion for creating agencies and special funds arrived in Poland in the early 1990s. The Polish state, faced with tasks that the individual ministries were not particularly prepared for, preferred to devolve them to agencies focused on particular specialist areas. This was to improve the performance of the state bureaucracies, as the agencies were to have more flexibility in the ways they delivered services and in the ways they could pay their staffs. It was also hoped that this was a way to make certain functions and services freer of direct political influence. The reality proved bitterly disappointing. The number of agencies and funds soon spiraled out of control, and stories of how money was being misused took up more and more column inches in the newspapers. To make matters worse, it became clear that in Poland's situation of having coalition governments, the parties were always dividing up the agencies between them. Will this government take action? If the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) performs well in the local elections next month, and most of the units of local government are in its hands, expect some attempts at the transference of resources and powers to local governments. The PSL may not like it and will probably kick up a fuss, but it is too weak to stop the SLD from doing anything it really wants. However, if the SLD polls poorly and ends up controlling a minority of local councils and mayors up and down the land, expect the two coalition partners to strike some sort of compromise and limit themselves to "reorganization and restructuring."

Chris Mularczyk is a Warsaw-based consultant. He can be e-mailed at cmularczyk@wbj.pl.