Macedonian authorities are having a hard time finding workplaces for so-called ethnic minority civil servants who have been employed in line with the 2001 Ohrid peace accord but who for years have lingered on the state payroll at home.
The authorities say they now have a plan to resolve the problem, but BIRN has calculated that in the meantime, over the past nine years, since these employments began, the country has spent more than 40 million euros on paying people who have not been assigned posts.
Macedonia’s Secretariat for Implementation of the Ohrid Agreement, which is in charge of these employments, says from 2009 to the end of 2017, it spent 67 million euros on their wages.
Given that the number of employees in the secretariat over the years has ranged between 1,300 and 2,100 – and that government officials have said 1,100 to 1,600 of these civil servants do not have a post yet – it appears that about two-thirds of this total sum, over 40 million euros, went on unassigned employees.
