People's deputies are collecting signatures for a draft resolution that reduces expenses for the Verkhovna Rada apparatus. They plan to redistribute the funds to pay assistants to people’s deputies.
The corresponding resolution may be considered in the coming days; in particular, the initiative was supported by more than 80 people's deputies.
After the publication of the declarations and their analysis, it became known that the salaries of people's deputies headed by committees could be three times lower than the salaries of the heads of the secretariats of the same committee.
According to people's deputy Alexandra Ustinova, people's deputies are not worried about their salaries, but about the fact that they do not have the opportunity to hire assistants who should help with legislative activities.
“During the time of the “regionals,” there were dozens of assistants to people’s deputies so that the people’s deputies’ guards and their retinue had a “crust” to resolve their issues. Now we have a time when the country needs quality lawmaking. And you have to pay for quality work. It cannot be that the people’s deputy is wondering where he can get money for at least 2-3 assistants.
Well, it’s really unfair when dozens of people in the departments of the Rada apparatus have such high salaries, and parliamentarians have to think about where to get the funds to pay for assistants who should help write laws,” she said.
This year, the government decided to balance the wage system through a line in the 2024 state budget and a government decree. At the end of the year, the Verkhovna Rada defended its apparatus in its final provisions: the conditions for remuneration of civil servants, determined by other provisions, are not applied when determining the remuneration of civil servants of the Verkhovna Rada apparatus. And this was prescribed in the draft state budget by amendments, in particular, by Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk and Deputy Speaker Alexander Kornienko.
As people's deputy Galina Tretyakova noted, according to the law, each people's deputy can have 31 assistants, but 70 thousand UAH are allocated for their maintenance. per month.
“The assistants’ functions include office work, processing voters’ requests, providing legal and analytical support for the preparation of bills and submitting amendments for the second reading, preparing materials when working in temporary investigative and special commissions, and much more. But the mother of an assistant is now a luxury that falls on the shoulders of the people’s deputy, who, in fact, is the employer.
But this should not be the case when we are talking about strong and independent institutions that should work in the interests of the state. Therefore, today we are obliged to talk about the problem of assistants, because Ukraine is losing from the poor quality of lawmaking. The project will not require additional funds to finance the Verkhovna Rada in 2024. All from the internal reserves of the Verkhovna Rada budget. There is no talk of people’s deputies’ salaries yet,” says Tretyakova.
Let us remind you that the head of the Verkhovna Rada staff, Vyacheslav Shtuchny, received almost 3 million UAH for 2022. For comparison: President Vladimir Zelensky received approximately 300 thousand UAH, that is, ten times less than the head of the Verkhovna Rada staff.
