Moldovan finance ministry starts process of implementing wage payment reform in public sector

Chisinau, 6 December /MOLDPRES/ - The Finance Ministry today informed about the launch of the process of implementing the reform of wage payment in the public sector. More than 150,000 employees from institutions financed from the state budget will receive increased salaries as of 1 December 2018. The health and education employees will get salaries by 24-25 per cent higher, the state secretary general of the Finance Ministry, Ion Chicu, has said at a news conference.   

The concerned decision does not regard about 50,000 public sector employees, who currently have high salaries, the participants in the news conference also said. Young specialists will benefit from the highest increases.

The first success of this reform is that decision-makers have managed to bring the public system in a single wage payment system, said Ion Chicu, put forward for the office of finance minister. Chicu also said that several essential stages would be covered in the process of implementing the reform: publication of the law, working out the seconded normative framework, providing methodological and didactic support to budgetary institutions in the process of elaboration of related acts and the calculation of salaries, monitoring the process of reform’s implementation in the budgetary institutions, assessing the first stage of implementation of the reform, adjusting the latter according to the needs.      

„We have a detailed action plan with what we are to do each day and hour. The government will approve several normative acts as early as at the meeting next week. A Call Centre was launched on the enforcement of the law. People having questions on the new law can appeal there. An important element is the establishment of the group of trainers,” Ion Chicu added. According to him, the budgetary employees will receive increased salary as early as in next January.   

Under the law a single wage payment grid will be created for all public authorities and institutions. The new regulations define the monthly salary as a money remuneration, which includes the basic salary and all increases, bonuses and other salary rights, provided additionally to each category of staff from the budgetary sector. The basic salary will be an element from the fixed part of the monthly remuneration, to which the staff from the public sector units has right, according to the wage payment grade, depending on the category of qualification and length of service. The wage payment stage will include the level of the basic salary related to the length of service.

The document establishes the Register of positions from the public sector, which will comprise eight occupational groups of budgetary activity, ciphered in letters. Among them, there are the public administration, justice, national defence, public order and security of the state, education and research, culture, youth and sport, social assistance and health, etc. The authority competent with the management of the Register is the Finance Ministry.

One of the social guarantees of the new wage payment system concerns the preservation of the overall salary income, in case, according to the new rules of wage payment, a lower salary is set for the employee than the one got earlier.  

The cost of the project’s implementation in the institutions financed from the state budget and local budgets is estimated for a medium term (2019-2021) at 3,950 thousand lei. The financial means are provided for in the medium-term budgetary framework. By 2021, the average monthly salary is expected to increase by about 30 per cent for the employees of the institutions financed from the state budget and by more than 55 per cent – for those financed from local budgets.