Minister of Home Affairs Nguyen Thai Binh

(VOVworld)- Minister of Home Affairs Nguyen Thai Binh, in his Q&A session at the National Assembly on Wednesday, stressed the need to scale down state employees to enhance the effectiveness of the public administration. He said the number of state employees has increased by 280,000, up nearly 15% in the last five years. The increase was attributed to the establishment of new agencies, especially in areas concerning environment, land, sea and island, tourism, external affairs, customs, tax and health care. Minister Binh said:“It is necessary to streamline the organizations, provide clear job description for each post and fine-tune the criteria for each grade of state employees and revise the evaluation of the performance of state employees on an annual basis. From now until 2016, we will not increase the number of state employees except for certain extraordinary cases”.

Minister Binh said that evaluation of the performance of state employees is an important factor in enhancing the effectiveness of the public administration: “We have put in place a project on reforming state employee recruitment by giving 3 out of 5 tests on the computer. We are trying to increase the number of questions for the tests and tighten the disciplines and inspection during and after the recruitment exams”.

Binh said that the government will continue to implement the program on state administrative reform until 2020 and reform the mechanism for state affairs.