State Audit Office: the meaning of the 400,000-euro Analytical Service will be questionable

The State Audit Office could conduct an audit on the usefulness of the future Analytical Service of the State Chancellery, for the creation of which the government allocated 400 thousand euros. The control will pay attention to whether the functions of the Analytical Service will not overlap with the work duties of the ministry’s officials, – the 360TV TV program “ZIŅneši” reports this evening.

Although State Comptroller Edgars Korchagins welcomes the government’s desire to make its decisions based on arguments based on data and analytics, and the creation of such an Analytical Service is to be welcomed, but at first glance, suspicions may arise about its usefulness.

“It is important that these emerging studies and analytics are actually used for decision-making, and not remain somewhere on the shelves, rotting, as is often the case with various studies that are ordered for expensive money, but then not used in decision-making,” emphasizes Korchagin.

The State Comptroller explains to “360TV ZIŅnešie” that after some time the Analytical Service of the State Chancellery will be under the scrutiny of an audit: “If the Analytical Service prepares materials that could just as well be prepared by others, or if the work prepared by them is not used, then of course there is a question, or the Analytical Service is necessary in such a way.”

The Saeima already has an Analytics Service. The Ministry of Finance has an analytics and forecasting department. For the Ministry of Agriculture – Strategy Analysis Department. There are structures with analysts under the auspices of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health. The judicial administration has an analytics department. The State Employment Agency has an analytics department. Almost every ministry or their subordinate institution has officials capable of analysis. The Ministry of Economy has a whole analytical department with as many as 14 employees, but despite this, the State Secretary of the Ministry, Edmunds Valantis, sees the sense of the future Analytical Service of the State Chancellery: “It would be very good if there is a view from the outside. There is not only the vision of the Ministry of Economy or the Ministry of Finance, but there is an outsider who can evaluate. It is often thought that we are not completely objective.”

The ministry responsible for local governments also sees the sense of such a centralized analytical service, because so far there has been a lack of data analysis that creates an overall picture of the problematic issues under the responsibility of several ministries. “It is important to have a governing body that takes the lead to generally gather these analysts together, guide them methodically, give instructions on how we can improve data collection. It is important that there is a central unit that creates competence,” says Gaits Ozols, Deputy State Secretary of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development in the field of digital transformation.

A part of the public may wonder – why couldn’t the job duties of those currently working in all ministries be simply changed in order to meet the State Chancellery’s vision of a modern state administration, instead of riling up the army of civil servants even more?

Anna Deksne, Head of the Development Department of the State Administration of the State Chancellery: “This would mean creating an analytics service in every ministry, and there we certainly did not have enough four people, we would have to employ a much larger amount of people. To retrain those people currently in the ministries – it must be understood that these data analysts are not researchers, not policy planners. These will be people with mathematical education, very specific people.”

The program “360TV ZIŅneši” tried to understand what happens to the several hundred employees of the Central Statistics Office, whose main job is to analyze data. The State Chancellery has discussed such an option, but still chose to ask the government for 400,000 euros to create its own analytical service.

The State Chancellery has already hired three specialists and is looking for one more to work in the new analytical service. For these four people, the annual salary fund will be 200 thousand euros, the other 200 thousand euros will be spent on outsourced research.

Anna Deksne, Head of the Development Department of State Administration of the State Chancellery: “The Analytical Service of the State Chancellery will provide support to ministries, helping ministries to combine data, to combine data from several ministries, to combine several data sets, creating models that are capable of supporting thoughtful political decisions.”

The program asks the question, have so far the ministries worked separately from each other, did not analyze the data and made decisions without evaluating the data? For example, the Ministry of Welfare answers – clearly no, because when proposals are sent to the government, they are accompanied by a so-called annotation containing arguments based on data.

“The day-to-day responsibility for analyzing data and gathering information, which is undeniably just everyday, is the responsibility of each department. They deal with it. Otherwise, work in the ministry is unimaginable without data and fact analysis,” Egils Zariņš, representative of the Ministry of Welfare, tells 360TV ZIŅneše.

The analytical service will not be operational. The topics will be sorted out for months, and in order to receive the help of these data analysts, the ministries will have to apply in the queue according to the tender procedure. A special commission will assess whether this service should be involved in the specific topics at all, or whether the ministry itself can deal with its officials already working in the ministries.

As the State Comptroller tells the program, in the end it may be the same as before – experts give their analysis, recommend the apparently best solution, but ministers prefer their own political course, the party’s position. And it will happen – the state spends 400 thousand euros on the Analytical Service, but the government ignores the information based on the data of these analysts.