Users of public administration services note that administrative procedures are in some cases unduly prolonged, not least because of the arbitrariness of the legal services organised in the various bodies. I can prove this myself with concrete examples in the Slovenian Environment Agency (ARSO) and in the former Ministry of Economy, now the Ministry of Infrastructure and Spatial Planning. In ARSO, for example, one procedure has been dragging on for more than four and a half years simply because the ARSO legal service disagrees with the decisions of the appeal body. There have been several other such cases, where the parties have given up and taken a short cut, through connections and acquaintances. The damage here is incalculable. The same applies to the legal service of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Spatial Planning, which was formerly in the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Here, too, there are individual lawyers who disagree with the decisions of the Administrative Court and, as a result, the proceedings take several years. What is important here is that the legal services hide behind the backs of the administrative staff, as individuals and individuals have repeatedly admitted to me. I am therefore convinced that it is high time that the norms (Articles 17, 21) laid down in the Regulation on the internal organisation, systematisation, posts and titles in public administration and judicial bodies (Official Gazette of the Republic of Slovenia, No 58/03, 81/03, 109/03, 43/04, 58/04 - corrected) were thoroughly revised in the civil service, 138/04, 35/05, 60/05, 72/05, 112/05, 49/06, 140/06, 9/07, 33/08, 66/08, 88/08, 8/09, 63/09, 73/09, 11/10, 42/10, 82/10, 17/11, 14/12, 17/12 and 23/12), and in particular the norms applicable to legal services. If the Government or a ministry has changed the norms in education, every citizen would expect the norms in the civil service to change as well, but not only cosmetically but radically.
I know of a case where a municipality asked the Government's Legal Service to clarify the provisions of a law because of a self-interested interpretation by an administrative employee, and the Legal Service referred the application to the same employee and the same legal service. Thus the circle was complete and the problem remained unsolved. The legal service should therefore be organised in a unified way, for example under the Ministry of Justice and Public Administration, which is currently the most active ministry. This would undoubtedly make the views on the implementation of the individual provisions of the regulations more uniform and independent of the views of officials in the individual ministries or constituent bodies. Of course, such a service would have to give its views in writing and administrative staff would be able to refer to them. Administrative staff would then have more autonomy, there would be less cause for delay in administrative procedures, and it would then be possible to quickly identify who is responsible for delaying a procedure, if and when it is present. At the moment, they can both make excuses for each other. Surely that is argument enough for something to change here.
In order to implement the above, the Regulation on Administrative Proceedings (Official Journal of the Republic of Slovenia No. 20/05, 106/05, 30/06, 86/06, 32/07, 63/07, 115/07, 122/07 - corrected) should also be amended, 31/08, 35/09, 58/10 and 101/10), in order to properly define the procedure between the administrative employee and the legal service and to make it subject to certain consequences or sanctions.In addition to the above, I also note that the Regulation on the internal organisation, systematisation, posts and titles in public administration and judicial bodies is still not in line with the Law on Inspection (Official Gazette of the Republic of Slovenia, No.Article 25 of this Regulation still contains the provision that the tasks of managing the internal organisational units of the inspection authority are carried out by the Director of the inspection authority. Where is the Chief Inspector, who, according to Article 9, is in charge of the Inspectorate? According to Article 28 of the amendment to the aforementioned law, the Government should have harmonised the above-mentioned regulation within 4 months of the entry into force of the IAA, i.e. by 7.7.2007. This would not be controversial if the organisation were uniform for all inspectorates, but this is not the case, as I can see from the information on the website. As an example, the Inspectorate of Transport, Energy and Spatial Planning has a chief inspector and directors of inspectorates, while the Market Inspectorate has only a chief inspector. Who, then, in the latter body is the person responsible under the above-quoted regulation? This inspectorate also has a very wide area of supervision, but no specific directors. The same observation applies to the Inspectorate for Agriculture, Forestry, Food and the Environment. It is therefore time to rectify the inconsistency of the cited regulation. I have drawn this to the attention of the competent ministry, but to date this has not changed.