A report that included the conclusions of the thematic working group charged with evaluating the national plan for administration reform alerted to many problems facing public administrations. Such as weak human resources, wage gap between employees, and challenges related to responsibility and accountability.
The thematic working group indicated, through field visits and meetings with various sectors, that there is no comprehensive database on public administration employees; This hindered the task of enumerating the employees and their tasks, in addition to the existence of a large shortage at the level of specialized human resources at the level of the external departments of the ministerial sectors.
On the other hand, the conclusions of the report, which will be presented next week in a plenary session, indicated that the requirements of the basic system of the public service did not keep pace with the challenges and stakes of administrative reform. This hindered achieving the desired results, in addition to the impact of the current systems of promotion, rating and evaluation of the employee on the effectiveness of the administrative reform.
In this context, the members of the thematic working group charged with evaluating the national plan for management reform mentioned the negative impact of the wage gap between employees of public administrations and the weakness of the incentives allocated to them on modernizing the administration and improving its performance, in addition to the weakness of the qualification, training and supervision systems in some public sectors, which affected the effectiveness of the plan. national.
The report noted the absence of a projected budget for the overall activation of the plan’s projects by sector. This made the picture unclear regarding the aspects and efficiency of spending, which was confirmed by the inability to provide the thematic working group with the financial allocations allocated according to the transformations and projects for each sector except for the sector in charge of reforming the administration, in addition to the weak reliance on clear measurement indicators to measure the effectiveness of the performance of public programs and link them to cost.
The aforementioned document referred to the weakness of the data related to the financing of the plan’s projects in the various reports and documents, whether available to the public or that were formally requested by the thematic working group, as well as the absence of creating committees for the financial tracking of the plan, with the sector’s justification for reforming the administration, the sector’s inability to monitor or Tracing the absence of jurisdiction and legal powers, in addition to the significant shortage of human resources.
The same source drew attention to the failure to publish the reports of the general financial or ministerial inspectorates to see the fate of the allocated funds and to establish a culture of transparency and linking responsibility to accountability, as well as relying on partnerships to finance part of the projects of the national plan, with the absence of post-evaluative reports to know the efficacy and fate of these allocated funds. With a contradiction in the available data; This contributed to creating a vague picture about the size of the appropriations allocated by the partners or by the general budget.
The conclusions of the report stated that the adoption of the national management reform plan coincided with the outbreak of the “Covid 19” pandemic, which affected the financial allocations directed to the management reform sector and the management modernization fund, with what the pandemic imposed in prioritizing and focusing more on the digital dimension.
The report highlighted the increase in the wage block from 2018 to 2021; This is the period of approval of the plan, as personnel expenditures amounted to about 117.84 billion dirhams, compared to 104.90 billion dirhams in 2017.
The thematic working group in charge of evaluating the national plan for management reform also indicated that this plan did not affect the number of financial positions granted to ministerial sectors, as the number of available positions remained stable, except for the management reform sector, which suffered from the absence of allocating any financial position during the years 2019-2020-2021.