With the two main decrees of the Jobs Act approved and with constitutional reform marching apace, change appears to be afoot. A change also recognized by Europe which has given the green light to the 2015 Stability Law, granting Italy greater flexibility precisely by virtue of the reforming action put in place by the government.
However, other reforms, although announced, have not yet been implemented. Among these, there is that of the Public Administration. Last summer, the text should have been examined by Palazzo Madama but then, for various reasons, it stalled. And so a precious year was lost for a reform that should be considered not "one" of the reforms but "the reform" of all reforms. Because, it is evident that without an efficient public administration it is difficult for the other reforms to fully unfold their effects.
From the point of view of the complexity of the bureaucracy, Italy, it is well known, does not position itself well in the international comparison: in the ranking Doing Business, compiled annually by the World Bank, ranks 56th out of 189 countries. The Italian position worsens when measured in terms of difficulty in obtaining permits from the public administration (116th position), the time required to fill in the forms to pay taxes (141st position) or the ability to enforce a contract (147th position). Such statistics certainly do not encourage those who have to decide whether or not to invest in the country: a radical change is therefore necessary.
The (still provisional) text of the public administration reform touches on various aspects, but until now, attention has focused above all on public management. The objective is to increase the efficiency of executives by reducing the weight of seniority criteria in favor of those based on merit. As? Simple, through the establishment of a Commission Super partes, made up of technicians, who will have the task of evaluating which managers are most suitable for a given position. The aforementioned appointment will have a three-year term and may be renewed only once. After that, the Commission will decide whether to assign a new assignment which may also include lower responsibilities than the previous ones and/or a transfer to another office.
What happens if the Commission does not positively evaluate the manager's work and decides not to assign him a further assignment? According to what was declared to the newspaper La Repubblica by Minister Madia, the manager could "lose his qualification up to losing his job". Basically, after a "suitable period" without a job, he can be fired. Now, given the drama of this event, it should be certain that the lack of a job is to be blamed solely on the manager's incapacity. Anyone familiar with public administration knows that, in certain (not rare) cases, civil servants do not work as much and as they would like, not due to their own incapacity, but due to the inability of those who should assign them specific tasks. Indeed, in many public administration offices it would be necessary to carry out a serious reorganization of human resources. The reform seems to want to outsource this task to the Commission. However, it is difficult to imagine that technicians unrelated to the offices and managements of, for example, a ministry, could better evaluate who - such as a general manager (who is often chosen externally and therefore is not subject to examination by the Commission ) -, that office or that direction, in fact, directs them.
Furthermore, the Commission will have to judge the managers on the basis of their own ability to evaluate their own collaborators. However, since the Jobs Act would appear not to apply to the public sector, executives will be able to evaluate their collaborators but not fire them because - and this is the logic underlying the non-extension of the new labor regulations to public employees -, in the event in error, the indemnity would be paid with taxpayers' money and not with own resources as a private entrepreneur would do. However, this reasoning is not fully convincing. First of all because, it cannot be excluded that citizens are not willing to finance (through their taxes) some errors of assessment, in exchange for more responsible managers. And then, if the reform aims to put merit at the centre, why not consider the ability to fire an integral part of it performance of a civil servant? Based on the current structure, the Commission would, in fact, risk assigning the tasks regardless of the degree of responsibility and involvement of the manager, non-marginal aspects of his professional value.
Let's assume, however, as a hypothesis, that the Commission still manages to assign the tasks to the most deserving executives and causes the incompetent ones to lose their qualifications. The ultimate result would be a public administration composed of capable and efficient managers. A commendable result, certainly, but not enough: efficient managers do not necessarily ensure efficient operation of the machine. If the rules remain the same, in fact, little changes. For example, if in order to make a decision it is necessary to hear the opinion of several administrations, despite the fact that they are – always hypothetically – the best in the world, the process is always complex, long and susceptible to real blockages when moving from one administration to another.
In conclusion, reforming public management is certainly a necessary step, but without a real simplification of procedures, which entails a significant reduction of powers, until now well distributed (and well defended) among the various public administrations, it is difficult to modernize the public sector. Among other things, we must also be quick because, in the standings Doing Business, in just one year, Italy lost 4 positions, going from 52nd to 56th.
