No additional spending: Support for police salary increase through budget reallocation

Trade unions of the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA), Border Police, and DKPT requested the Council of Ministers of BiH to adjust coefficients for fair salary calculation in order to comply with the established principles of the Law on Salaries and Benefits in institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, writes the Patria News Agency.

The coefficients applied for calculating police officers' salaries are discriminatory compared to other employees in the institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Minister of Security of BiH, Dragan Mektić, also supported these requests from police officers.

The Council of Ministers of BiH discussed the Draft Law on Amendments to the Law on Salaries and Benefits in the Institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is almost entirely harmonized. The only remaining issue is to try to find a solution regarding the increase of salary coefficients for police officers and soldiers with secondary vocational education.

During the session, the will to increase the coefficients for police officers and soldiers was expressed, but due to a lack of financial resources, the Ministry of Security and the Ministry of Defense were asked to propose a financing model for the increase of coefficients for police officers and soldiers to the Council of Ministers by the end of next week, based on internal reallocation of funds from the adopted budgets, given that the Budget of the institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina and BiH's international obligations has been adopted and its amendments are legally impossible.

Otherwise, earlier, MP Šemsudin Mehmedović requested amendments to the Law on Amendments to the Law on Salaries of employees in BiH institutions in the BiH Parliament, but his proposal did not pass at yesterday's session due to the lack of an entity majority from Republika Srpska.