40% of public sector salaries spent on 260,000 “guards”

The Romanian state spends around 4 billion euros annually on paying 260,000 public sector employees in the so-called "special" systems, of public security and defence, who do not feature in official statistics, i.e. 38% of overall employee spending in the public sector (10.7 billion euros), according to ZF estimates based on data from the Ministry of Finance and from the National Institute of Statistics (INS).

A breaking up into salary structures and institutions has emerged for the first time in the negotiations to cut wages of public sector employees. The problem is that between the data from the Finance Ministry, according to which there are 1.36 million public sector employees, and data from the Institute of Statistics, according to which there are only 1.1 million public sector employees, there is a difference of 260,000 employees whose salaries are unaccounted for.

"Data on the salary structure exclude military personnel and assimilated personnel (the Ministry of National Defence, the Ministry of Administration and the Interior, the Romanian Intelligence Service etc)," reads a document supplied by the INS where the salary structure of the 1.1 million civilian public sector workers is featured.

Consequently, one in five public sector workers is employed in the "structures", i.e. in public order and national safety. This is the "interior affairs" part of the Ministry of Administration and the Interior, the four secret services (SRI, SPP, SIE, and STS) and the military.

By comparing the amounts spent on the 1.1 million civilian public sector workers, around 6.7 billion euros for 2010, with the overall salary expenditures as provided for in the 2010 budget - 10,7 billion euros (9.3% of the GDP), it results that for only 19% of the overall number of public sector employees, the state spends 4 billion euros, i.e. 36% of the budget allocated for public sector wages.