Interior Minister Mihail Mikov revealed a long and well-kept secret on June 25. Speaking in Parliament, during the debates on the amendments to the Interior Ministry Act, Mikov revealed the exact number of employees in the ministry.

Mikov’s short speech would not have been of such importance had it not been the first time Bulgarian society had heard how many Interior Ministry employees there are.
Until now, the only data available on ministry’s staff policy was the amount of money allocated, by the state, for salary expenses each year. The total for 2008 is 805 million leva.

All interior ministers, until now, have kept the total amount of employees a state secret protected by the Classified Information Act. Mikov’s reasoning, on June 25, was that the release of the data was not in breach of the act and that society had to know how much of its money was spent on the ministry and to what end. 

“This act allows the respective interior minister to decide on whether this data can be classified as a state secret,” Georgi Angelov, senior economist at the Open Society Institute in Sofia, told The Sofia Echo. Angelov was the first to alert society about the unwillingness of the ministry to talk about its staff numbers this February.

“Five months ago, when Eurostat published its data on the number of police forces in EU states, it was only Bulgaria that had no data against its name,” he said. 

Until Mikov spoke on June 25, the ministry was the only state institution in Bulgaria, and, according to Eurostat, in the EU, that has never released such data.
So exactly what did the data show?

A total of 63 000 people are employed in the ministry. Of them, 47 000 are police, 8000 firefighters, 5000 are working in the ministry’s administration and another 3000 exercised similar services.

With all the numbers in hand, the question of how effective the ministry really is easily comes to mind.

Comparison is always the easiest choice when judging one’s effectiveness. 

“The Eurostat data are pretty clear. According to them, Bulgaria has the second largest number of Interior Ministry personnel in the EU with Cyprus being on top,” Angelov said.

Of course, EU countries’ population varies greatly, so Angelov’s calculations, first published in OSI magazine Politiki, showed that for every 100 000 people in Bulgaria, 615 were police employees. The leader in the chart, Cyprus, had 667 police employees while Finland, the last country on the table, had 158 police employees. Austria, for example, which has roughly the same population as Bulgaria, had 322 police employees. 

“The criteria judging the effectiveness of the Interior Ministry, for me, is the number of solved crimes,” Angelov said. From here, things become a little bit complicated. In terms of overall crime-numbers, Eurostat shows Bulgaria as the fifth EU country in terms of low crime figures.

“This, however, is not very accurate because one can never tell how many crimes have been left unreported by people. A more accurate criteria is the number of murders, which are hardly ever left unreported.” Here the situation changes. Bulgaria is the fourth EU country in terms of high-number of murders, for every 100 000 people (2.37) are murdered, according to Angelov, based on Eurostat data.  First is Lithuania (8.87), followed by Estonia (6.77) and Latvia (6.45). “To me, these numbers show that the ministry is not achieving even an average level of effectiveness compared to other EU countries,” Angelov said.

His opinion certainly differed from what Mikov told reporters on June 30. After meeting members of the Confederation of Employers and Industrialists in Bulgaria, Mikov said that Bulgaria’s police force was around the EU average and gave a reasoning that most southern EU countries had larger police forces. Next to that, he reminded reporters that many other state bodies relied on the ministry’s support in the performance of their duties. He did say that the ministry’s personnel had to be “optimised, though not necessarily through downsizing”.

Mikov’s moderate take on the issue, only a few days after he announced the staff data, can be explained by a number of reasons.

“This situation is similar to what happened in the Defence Ministry a few years ago,” Angelov said. “Back then, the Defence Ministry had the same take as the Interior Ministry and kept all the data on its personnel secret. After Bulgaria joined Nato in 2004, however, the Defence Ministry was forced to publish the data. That way, the public became more aware of how Defence Ministry spends its money,” Angelov said.

For him, Mikov’s decision to come open on the issue, carefully protected by all of his predecessors, was Mikov’s way to show that the reform within the ministry was achieving something. Mikov took the post this April, almost a year before the next general elections. “He can't reform the system this time so he decided to take some credit as a minister and announce the data. What he will get, however, is a critical look at the ministry’s staff policy and effectiveness which, in the end, will strengthen civil control over the ministry as happened with the Defence Ministry,”Angelov said. From what Mikov said on June 30, he had already realised this important factor.