Salary publication surprise: Advisors make more than ministers

Ministries have started publishing on their websites the salaries of their employees and an already known fact was thus verified: tens of salaried employees of ministries round off their incomes from other sources and therefore end up making two or three times more than a minister.
This is the first step towards the transparency of an obscure system. The state spent 11 billion euros on public sector employees’ salaries last year and most of the times the salary payment criteria were not transparent and actual performance had nothing to do with it.
The solution chosen was to publicly reveal the positions and the salaries paid, but not the names of the people who took the money or other details to justify the high salaries. In Interior Ministry’s case, for instance, it is hard to know what an ‘agent’ does to get a higher salary than an ‘officer’.
Analysts believe the biggest problem stems from fact that base salaries are paid, which are then increased to several times the original amount in various ways.
President Traian Basescu demanded state institutions to publicly reveal their salaries two weeks ago. The same request came from ZF at the beginning of the month. Yet ZF demanded that the information published include the name, the position, how one got that position, the date it was received and the salary.