Why aren't Commissioner's appeals resolved within 30 days as laid down by the Law?
Answer:
In the last several months Commissioner's Office recurrently could not end appeal procedure in 30 days prescribed deadline, within which the Commissioner is liable to make a decision. The reasons for this do not lie in weakness of the Office, these reasons are rather of objective character.
On one hand, the number of appeals constantly grows, therefore in 2005 there were 430 cases, and in 2006 over 1800 cases. By the end of December 2006 the Office managed to solve over 1.600 cases (71%), however over 650 are still in the procedure.
On the other hand, number of employees in Commissioner's Office has not changed: four graduated lawyers, including the Commissioner and his Deputy, which due to increased workload, objectively cannot always accomplish the proceedings in legally prescribed timeframe.
The reason why it is not possible to increase the number of employees is that the Government of Serbia's authorized departments did not meet numerous requests made by the Commissioner, for providing additional premises, since the existing one does not allow several more employees to be hired, although the funds were approved and the consent granted by the National Parliament. The consent was granted by means of Job Classification Act providing for 21 employees in the Office. In the second half of 2005, the Republic Property Direction has even promised to the Commissioner that it shall solve this problem as a priority, but unfortunately it still hasn't, though he has constantly insisted on this.
By solving this problem, the Commissioner's Office would eliminate any kind of delay in its actions.
