[size=75:1vh00662]Sofia echo 19 January 2010

Interior Ministry reveals staff numbers in full

The total number of employees at the Interior Ministry is 55 052, Bulgarian-language Dnevnik daily quoted Deputy Interior Minister Vesselin Vouchkov as saying on January 19 2010.

Of the 55 052 Ministry employees, the number of police officers was 26 861 and the rest were employed in the administration and other auxiliary services, including the fire fighters.

The maximum number allowed by Bulgarian law for Interior Ministry personnel was 61 170 people, which means that the ministry is now 6118 people short of meeting the quota.

The figures also mean that there are 352 police officers for every 100 000 Bulgarians, given that Bulgaria's population is now about 7.6 million.

In Germany, this rate is 324 police officers, compared to 475 in Spain, 425 in Hungary and 362 in Austria.

The data was released at a conference called by the Interior Ministry, the Open Society Institute in Sofia and the Access to Information Programme, which was meant to release previously unknown information about the ministry.

This was the first time a ministry official gave an exact figure on how many people are employed in the system, with previous statements put at between 60 000 and 70 000 people.

The reason why this data was kept from the public was because it was described as classified information, which was the reason why Bulgaria was the only European Union member without any data concerning Interior Ministry staff in EU statistical body Eurostat. Now this gap is expected to be filled.

The ministry decided not to reveal the staff number of two of its directorates - the Operative and Technical Information Directorate and Anti-Organised Crime Directorate - which will remain classified information.

The ministry's 2009 budget was about one billion leva, Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said. The figure was 280 per cent higher than in 2000.

Tsvetanov said that the ministry would cut up to five thousand of its staff positions for which it did not have payroll funds. Given that the ministry is more than six thousand people short of its quota, however, this would mean that these cuts will mostly be on paper.