The situation with the draft budget for next year is, frankly speaking, strange: there are no plans to increase salaries for teachers and doctors, but they are going to allocate more money to prosecutors, judges and law enforcement officers.
How do officials explain this?
Nina participated in meetings of the budget committee and wanted to understand how their faction reacted to the proposals. She noted that expenses could be reduced by as much as 99 billion hryvnia. During the discussion, it became clear that there is a program in the budget that involves increasing the salaries of prosecutors by 2.7 billion hryvnia compared to this year.
The attorney general and other senior prosecutors decided it was time to raise the cost of living on which their salaries are based.
Now it is 1,600 hryvnia, but they suggest focusing on 2,102 hryvnia, as in other government agencies. The district prosecutor's salary is 25 subsistence minimums, and with various bonuses, prosecutors receive on average 68 thousand hryvnia. But no one could explain why they decided to revise the cost of living right now.
Who else is on the list?
Prosecutors are not the only ones who will receive a salary increase. The budget plans to increase spending on judges of local and appellate courts by 1.35 billion hryvnia. And that’s not all - another 215 million will be added under another program. The result will be almost 1.5 billion.
Judges of first instance can now be paid bonuses of up to 40% of their salary every month. Apparently, due to low salaries in local courts, it is difficult to find people willing to work.
Law enforcement agencies are also not lagging behind and are trying to bring their salaries into line with the new laws. Their payments depend on the cost of living, which is set at the beginning of the year. Each department is trying to “recover” the lost amounts.
In total, it is planned to increase salary costs for about 70 fund managers. This is due to the reform, which began in 2020 and involves the creation of a grading system. That is, the salary will be higher for those who show better results in the same position.
The Ministry of Finance assures that all requests were collected into a single document and sent for consideration. But Nina believes that it is necessary to conduct a dialogue with managers, adjust requests and look for ways to reduce costs, and not just agree on everything indiscriminately.
However, there appears to be no political will for this, especially on the part of the Prime Minister, who is supposed to organize the work of the ministries.
Thus, an interesting picture emerges: the money will be used to support those who already receive a lot, while teachers and doctors are left without attention. It will be interesting how this will affect further debates in parliament and public perception of budget policy.
