Local governments in Slovakia are 35 years old, and their modernization is still an unfinished project. A discussion among experts showed that alongside the efficiency of financial management, the quality of oversight and a realistic allocation of competencies are also key. Proposed solutions include new rules, shared services, and clearer financing.
35 years of experience and the question of efficiency
After three decades, we can compare what the public sector can adopt from the practices of private or non-governmental organizations. It was noted that the local government system works, but often primarily thanks to the people, not because the system is perfect. The Supreme Audit Office (NKÚ) confirms the efforts of many towns and municipalities to manage resources purposefully, but it warns of mistakes in investments without well-thought-out operation and maintenance.
The sustainability of projects tends to be a weak point: a municipality builds a building, but there is no money left for its proper management. Oversight is not equally strong everywhere – approximately 7 percent of municipalities do not have a chief auditor, and elsewhere auditors have so many appointments that it is questionable whether they can keep up. The rule that „trust, but verify“ also requires practical conditions.
Oversight under the microscope: independence, qualifications, manageable workloads
The discussants agreed that local government lacks a standalone law on oversight activities. Chief auditors are designated by law as independent, but they are elected by the council, which approves their salary, work plan, and bonuses, which reduces the degree of independence. Qualifications are also an issue: the Municipal Establishment Act still permits only secondary education, although auditing contracts, accounting, and budgets requires skills at the level of a university graduate, as already applies to higher territorial units. Added to this are extremes with fragmented appointments – there have been cases of dozens of concurrent contracts or a total workload of more than triple full-time – which makes statutory obligations practically impossible to meet. Hence the question arose whether every municipality must have its own auditor and whether the competencies of municipalities should be tiered, since today the same obligations are borne by a small village and a large city.
Tiered competencies and shared services
One solution is shared service centers – joint offices with specialists in accounting, payroll, human resources, or public procurement who serve the entire region. In the pilot project, 21 centers are to be established; even before full launch, more than 400 local governments with approximately 560,000 inhabitants have signed up. An inspiring model would have municipalities, within 90 days after elections, register under a selected center, which saves people and money and raises the professionalism of delivery.
According to the plans presented, by the end of the electoral cycle the government is to establish the Government Council for Public Administration, submit a law on oversight activities in the autumn, and embark on adjustments to the functioning of district offices. The plans also include systematic training for local government employees, transferring part of the traffic police agenda to civilian authorities, and guaranteeing a „subsistence minimum“ of municipal revenues so that budgets do not fall below the level of the previous year. In the long term, an integrated model of state administration at the district level and a tiering of local government competencies are to be introduced; the NKÚ welcomes these steps and announces that it will monitor their costs as well as their benefits.
