The announced recruitment plan in the public sector is presented in the media as the key to modernizing the Italian public administration. Following the release of the turnover, new entries in PA personnel, notoriously "senior" in terms of age and service, are an indispensable condition for the reform that the European Union is asking of us as a pre-condition for accessing the funds of the Next Generation EU. But you have to be very careful not to mistake the chronological order of the steps to take.
Recruiting cannot be the first step, unless preceded, or at least accompanied, by an action to improve the administrative and financial capacity of the Administrations receiving the winners of the next competitions. Otherwise, the risk is that future new hires end up being underutilized, and, over time, demotivated.
First of all, therefore, you need to know who to hire, with which profiles and for which roles. In other words, a mapping of public personnel is needed to understand how to hire. In the meantime, Fondazione Etica with Luiss-Icedd is making it available here for the Regions, and, shortly, for the Municipalities.
Personnel management is one of the areas in which the source from which to draw information is clear: the legislative decree 33/2013, in fact, provides not only for the publication of data on personnel within a specific "personnel" item in the Transparent Administration section of the institutional websites, but specifies that those data must be published according to a standard format, which allows that homogeneity of information which is the premise for a comparative evaluation of the PAs.
The standard is clear, just as the tool to be used is clear – the annual account – but still today there are Administrations that do not publish it or that publish it partially.
The benchmark region is Liguria, with a score of 80 (Very Good), followed in the lower rating class by Lombardy, with a score of 69 (Good) and, in the same class, from Marche, Veneto and Emilia Romagna.
On the opposite side of the ranking, Molise is not only the last positioned, but, with a score of 2, it falls in the rating class fallible, where it is accompanied by five other Regions, four of which are Northern Regions with Special Statute (SS): in increasing order of rating, Valle d'Aosta (score 8), Calabria (12), Friuli (13) and the two Autonomous Provinces of Trento and Bolzano (respectively with scores of 17 and 18).
In general, no Southern Region obtains a sufficient Public Rating for the area, apart from Puglia which is very close to it (score 49 out of 100). In more detail, let's see the results on the individual indicators used by the Public Rating methodology of Fondazione Etica and Luiss-Icedd.
Staff Price
The prevailing public opinion in Italy believes that civil servants cost too much, especially in the Administrations of the South, but the numbers found do not say exactly that.
If you look at the cost of regional public personnel that every citizen has to bear, the highest belongs to a Region of the North, and not of the South, such as Valle d'Aosta: over 1,800 euros per capita (On the one hand, Valle d'Aosta has been able to hire more thanks to its statutory autonomy; on the other, it is a very small body which, however, cannot proportionally have the same employees in Lombardy and Veneto who, on the other hand, can exploit economies of scale). Three other Northern Regions follow: the two Autonomous Provinces of Bolzano and Trento (respectively with a per capita cost of 237 and 181 euros) and Friuli Venezia Giulia (155 euros).
Since the fifth Region with the highest per capita cost of regional personnel is Sicily, in the South, the variable that seems to affect the indicator is not the North/South one, but the Ordinary Statute/Special Statute.
Sardinia is the only Region with a Special Statute to keep personnel costs below 100 euros per capita.
On the opposite side of the ranking, the citizens of Lombardy called upon to bear the lowest expenditure for regional public personnel, with 16 euros per capita, followed by the Veneto, with 26 euros per capita.
Among the Southern Regions, the one that weighs less on its citizens the cost of personnel is Puglia: with less than 39 euros per pc it is in fourth place in the ranking.
The geographical location appears to only partially affect the indicator it measures the incidence of expenditure for personnel out of total current expenditure. On the one hand, in fact, it is a Northern Region such as Lombardy that has an incidence below 1%, followed by another Northern Region such as Veneto (1.2%). On the other hand, also on the opposite side of the ranking there is a Northern Region: the Valle d'Aosta has personnel expenditure which affects the total current expenditure for more than 20%, placing itself in last place.
The Southern Regions are distributed along the entire axis of the ranking: Sardinia, Puglia and Campania in the first eight positions; Basilicata, Sicily and Molise in the last four; Abruzzo and Calabria in the central positions.
It should be noted that Tuscany, the benchmark Region, occupies a substantially intermediate position in the ranking of both indicators, confirming the fact that a performing Region is not necessarily the one that spends the least on personnel.
Consulting and fixed-term staff
Two other indicators also affect personnel expenditure: consultancy and fixed-term employment.
The numbers revealed by the analysis seem to dispel the commonplace according to which the Regions spend a lot on consultancy: their average cost in relation to the total cost of personnel is 0.6%. Another significant result is that performing institutions such as Tuscany (1.3%) and the Public Administration of Bolzano (4.8%) spend the most on consultants. This allows us to state that the expenditure on consultancy is not automatically synonymous with waste of public money: on the contrary, for some specific, highly qualified skills, it may be more convenient for a Region to find them externally, limited to the necessary time, rather than incur the fixed cost of a permanent job.
On the opposite side of the ranking, the lowest expenditure on consultancy belongs to a northern region such as Liguria and one to the south such as Sicily, both with an incidence of 0.1% on total personnel expenditure.
The second indicator mentioned in the title of the paragraph measures the percentage of temporary employees on permanent contracts. The results of the analysis reveal an average percentage just above the 2%, with peaks exceeding 4% both for a low-performing region such as Sicily (4.5%) and for a performing region such as Emilia Romagna (4.4%).
The lowest percentage of fixed-term hires belongs to Liguria, Lombardy and Umbria. For Campania and Piedmont, the annual personnel account does not report fixed-term employees. (Consequently, the value is equal to zero and the assigned score is the maximum).
Middle age
The average age of regional employees is 54 years old. Therefore, a high average age, which comes close to touching 57 years in Basilicata and stands at 51 in Piedmont. It should be noted that for one third of the sample the data is not available.
Absences due to illness
A Another cliché about civil servants concerns the high rate of absenteeism, especially in the South: in this case the results of the analysis seem to confirm it.
The indicator, in fact, shows that the highest number of average sick days per year belongs, with more than 10 days, to two Southern Regions: Sicily and Campania, with 12.3 and 11.4 days respectively. Conversely, the Regions with the lowest number are two in the North: Liguria (For Liguria, the data on sick leave appears very low compared to that of the other Regions, even efficient ones such as Veneto or Lombardy. The value is also confirmed over the years However, it should be considered that other paid absences are on average high, such as paid leave pursuant to article 42, paragraph 5, Legislative Decree 151/2001 and leave pursuant to Law 104); (2.6 days ) and Veneto (5.7).
It should be noted that a performing region such as Emilia Romagna exceeds the average of 7.9 days of illness, (with 8.4 days on average) compared to a poorly performing region such as Basilicata which manages to stay below it (with 7.5 average days).
Also in this indicator for one third of the sample the evaluation was not possible due to failure to publish the data. (The annual account is not available. The data published on absences in the AT section of the institutions' websites is monthly and often expressed as a percentage).
Senior executives
Yet another cliché: there are too many managers, especially in the less efficient regions, and therefore in the South. The numbers of the analysis seem to say otherwise in this case as well. If it is true, in fact, that the highest percentage of managers out of employees belongs to a low performing southern region such as Sicily (8.8%), it is also true that the second highest percentage belongs to a performing northern region such as Sicily Lombardy (6.5%).
Similarly, on the opposite side of the ranking, it is true that the Public Administration of Trento has the lowest percentage of executives (2.1%), but it is also true that Puglia, in third place, does not differ much (3.1%).
On the basis of the data found in the analysis, it can be stated that a high percentage of executives out of the total staff of a Region does not in itself constitute a sign of waste and inefficiency.
Awards
Legislative decree 33/2013 establishes, in article 20, that in the specific item of the Transparent Administration section on institutional websites information relating to the amount of bonuses linked to performance is published individual, differentiating those allocated and those effectively distributed during the year, separately for executives and non-executive employees.
Such regulatory obligation is disregarded by eight Regions, which publish incomplete and/or outdated data on executive bonuses, subject of the survey. These are not very virtuous regions of the South, such as Calabria and Campania, but also of virtuous regions of the North, such as Tuscany and Friuli Venice Julia. A limiting case is, once again, that of Molise, which appears to have never published the data. (Even if at the end of 2020 the item dedicated to bonuses in the AT section of the Molise website finally becomes populated, it is only partially populated, not including, for example, the data relating to the amount of bonuses distributed to executives from 2017 onwards ).
Among the remaining thirteen Regions, only for three does the percentage of bonuses disbursed in payroll stop below the 90% of the amounts allocated. This means that the bonuses, designed as a tool to incentivize deserving employees, in most cases have turned into a sort of additional pay, only formally conditional on the achievement of the objectives set for the year. And this, of course, is even more inexcusable for executives.
In Emilia Romagna, Marche and Sardinia, all the bonuses allocated to executives have been paid out.
The Region in which the gap between the sums disbursed and allocated is greatest is, unexpectedly, Sicily, with 78.9% of bonuses paid to executives.
An even more significant indicator regarding premiums is the degree of differentiation in their distribution: an Administration, in fact, can legitimately decide to distribute all the allocated bonuses, but without renouncing the differentiation in their distribution. At least that's what citizens have a right to hope: since it is public money, it should be used to reward the best performing managers.
Moreover, the aforementioned article 20 of legislative decree n. 33 of 2013 is very clear in this regard: the Administrations must account for the "level of selectivity" used, as well as the degree of differentiation. However, as can be seen in the table below, the level of selectivity is low. Even in Lombardy and Piedmont.
Tuscany is the benchmark Region in this indicator, with a degree of differentiation in the distribution of bonuses to executives that clearly detaches it from all the others. Also for this indicator, one third of the Regions do not publish the data necessary for the evaluation.
