The cabinet is weighing a plan to cut the number of regional social assistance directorates from 28 to 13. The labour and social policy ministry put forward the proposal, now open for public comment on the Strategy.bg platform.
This follows our earlier story on merging the regional "Social Assistance" directorates, when labour and social policy minister Natalia Efremova told a parliamentary committee that the review of the Social Assistance Agency's structure was not yet done.
The change is part of new organisational rules for the Social Assistance Agency. The ministry says it based the plan on an analysis of how much work each directorate handles.
"Streamlining the number of regional social assistance directorates will not lead to job cuts," the ministry said. Staff from directorates that close will be able to move into teams at the remaining ones.
The plan's aim, the document says, is to organise work better across the agency's local branches. It states this will improve services for people and cut administration costs.
A week earlier, Efremova told the same parliamentary committee how the merger would work. It takes into account each region's population, the number of cases, and the number of applications handled. That way, the workload is split roughly evenly among the smaller number of regional directorates.