Around 11,000 employees are expected to be affected by the merger of the National Revenue Agency (NRA) and the Customs Agency. The news was announced earlier today by the Ministry of Finance, where it said work was beginning to create a single revenue agency.
At present, the NRA employs nearly 8,000 staff, while around 3,000 are employed by the Customs Agency. In any case, the creation of the new structure will lead to redundancies, as the activities of many of those working in the two places overlap partially or completely. In all likelihood, it is the optimisation of the administration and cost-cutting that are among Finance Minister Assen Vassilev’s main ideas.
The idea of a single revenue agency has been announced periodically over the years, and was first raised by GERB in 2014. Then they met strong resistance and never managed to implement it.
The merger process between the two agencies is likely to be very lengthy, for purely administrative reasons, as it requires changing a number of laws. All this creates the preconditions for blocking the work at least for a certain period of time.
The Treasury reasoned that the creation of single revenue agencies has been successfully implemented in many countries around the world, including several European Union member states, as well as in leading economies such as the United States and the United Kingdom, where they have proven to be effective in improving transparency and streamlining government revenue collection processes.
