Although the Employment Office warned the Government a year and a half ago about the existence of multimillion-dollar abuses in connection with the subsidization of wages for persons who received a certificate of disability, the authorities did not take any action, and the item in the state budget has meanwhile increased from 14 to 34 million euros.
Last week, at the proposal of the Government, the Assembly adopted the budget rebalancing, which increases the item for subsidizing wages for people with disabilities from the planned 20 to 34 million euros, without additional explanations. For a year and a half, the relevant ministry has been sending almost the same answer to “Vijesta” that a law is being prepared that should prevent these abuses, but nothing has happened, instead, the adoption of the rebalancing undermines the current situation.
This item in the budget is now 20 million more than when the representatives of the Institute warned about the existence of organized fraud. Since then, the head of the Fund for Professional Rehabilitation has warned about this several times in “Vijesti” texts Denis Martinović and the then president of the Board of Directors of the Institute Dejan Vojvodicwho has since been replaced.
They proposed that it is necessary to amend the law in order to limit the amount of subsidy per employed person with disabilities, because now there is no such limit, which is why employers report the monthly earnings of people with disabilities, which are four times higher than the salary of the Prime Minister. They asked to review the work of the commissions that assign the status of persons with disabilities and the percentage of disability.
In three municipalities, 53 percent of people with disabilities
According to current data, in the municipalities of Berane, Rožaje and Bijelo Polje, where 14 percent of the total population lives, there are 53 percent of the total number of people with disabilities in Montenegro. The Institute also noticed that there is a frequent change of residence from other cities to these until they receive a certificate, and then return to their previous place of residence.
The current law does not give this Fund, which operates within the Institute, any possibility of checking the work of these commissions or the amount of earnings for which the employer registers a disabled person for a subsidy, which can amount to 75 percent of the reported gross earnings.
This Fund receives money from a special contribution paid by all employers who do not employ a disabled person, which amounts to five percent of the average salary for the total number of employees employed by that employer. However, the payment of these subsidies is guaranteed by the state, so the Government compensates from the budget the difference required for the payment of all received subsidies.
Based on this fee, the fund now receives an annual income of around nine million euros, and now the state will add another 24 million euros to it from the budget. Until 2021, this Fund was in balance, and since then, the number of people with disabilities and the amount of wages that the employer reports to them has started to increase drastically. For the year 2022, the budget predicted that subsidies for the employment of persons with disabilities would amount to 10 million, and even then they had grown to 15 million.
The growth in the number of unemployed persons with disabilities is also doubtful
The adopted rebalancing of the budget shows that there are also suspicions of abuses in another item of the Employment Service, as the amount for benefits to unemployed persons on the records of the Service has increased from 22 to 24 million euros. In this item, most of the money also goes to the unemployed who have a document stating that they are disabled, and they also most often receive it from the commissions in these three municipalities.
Unemployed persons with disabilities receive monthly allowances from the Institute in the amounts of 180, 225 or 450 euros, which are counted towards their length of service and to which they are entitled until retirement, without the obligation to report to the bureau and look for a job. There were over nine thousand such persons in June.
When these medical boards give the person who requested it a certificate that he has a disability of the second and third categories caused by the conditions at the workplace, he is entitled to a monthly benefit in the amount of the minimum pension (which is now 450 euros) until retirement or employment, although, like the others on the record, there is no obligation to report to the bureau and seek employment.
Do parties offer compensation for votes?
Former President of the Council of the Fund for Professional Rehabilitation Goran Maconovićin December of last year, when he was in that position, when asked by “Vijesti” whether it is normal that in some municipalities in the north, people with disabilities make up to 20 percent of the population, on the basis of which they exercise various rights from the budget, as well as that if those figures are disputed for him, then he said that attention should be paid to the period when those figures were increased.
He said that in Berane, Rožaje and Bijelo Polje, there was a significant increase in persons who were recognized as having a certain percentage of disability, after the Constitutional Court canceled the decision on allowances for mothers with three or more children.
Macanović suspects that those figures were increased in the pre-election period of 2016, when some political parties promised their voters who lost benefits due to the decision of the Constitutional Court, that they would receive benefits as disabled persons in the amount of 40 percent of the minimum wage.
“When the elections ended, that allowance was abolished, but whoever received it then – continues to receive it. Now it is 225 euros and they will receive it until they get a job or retire,” Macanović said at the time.
Data from the Institute’s records now support this claim, because in municipalities with a high percentage of people with disabilities in the population, such as Beran, Rožaj and Petnjica, women make up more than half of unemployed people with disabilities, while for example in Podgorica, and most municipalities on the coast and in the central region, women account for five to 15 percent of the number of people with disabilities.
From the total budget of the Institute, after the rebalancing, of 67 million euros, 34 million goes to subsidizing the wages of employed persons with disabilities, 24 million to compensations for persons on the record (most of whom are also persons with disabilities), while for active employment measures, it which is the basic role of the Institute, only 3.5 million euros or 5.2 percent of the Institute’s total budget was allocated.
If the government had listened to “Vijesti”, they would have received more than from new taxes
The current amount for subsidizing the employment of persons with a recognized status of persons with disabilities is EUR 25 million higher than three years ago, when there were suspicions of the beginning of mass abuse of these rights.
Since “Vijesti” began to warn about this problem that is ravaging the state budget, the disputed item has increased by 20 million.
If the Government had in the meantime acted on the recommendations it received from the Institute and thereby limited the possibilities for abuse, these expenditures would have been at the level of the Fund’s income from compensation and the state budget would have saved about 25 million euros.
How valuable that saving would be, is shown by the examples from the new Fiscal Strategy and the adopted laws on the increase of VAT, excise taxes and other duties, because the state budget would receive more money if these abuses were prevented than most of the new duties that caused protests in part of the economy and citizens – taxation of shipments via the Internet, vehicle sales tax, excise duty on wine, VAT on books and tickets, tax on winnings from games of chance, fuel marking,…
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Source: www.vijesti.me
