Parliament Endorses Statistics Agency Reform

The Parliament passed with its first hearing draft law on reforming the country’s state statistic department, which, as the officials say, aim at increasing credibility and efficiency of the agency.

The Department of the Statistics, which is currently under the subordination of the Economy Ministry, will transform into a legal entity of public law, formally independent from any state structure, with the new name of Sakstat (Geostat), according to the draft law.

The agency will have eight-member Supervisory Board.

Two seats in the board will be filled by an economy minister and minister for finance, or by deputies; the third member will be either president or vice-president of the National Bank of Georgia.

The rest of the five seats in the board should be filled by, as the draft says, “independent experts” selected by the President with approval of the Parliament. The President has to nominate two candidates for each of the seats and it will be up to the Parliament to select one of them on each of the five seats.

“It is important that independent members will have the majority in the board; so, five out of eight members will be independent and one of them will be elected as the head of a chairman of the board,” Tamar Kovziridze, an advisers of the Prime Minister, told lawmakers at the parliamentary session on arch 27.

MP Giorgi Akhvlediani of the Christian-Democratic Movement, a leading party in the parliamentary minority group, however, said the proposed model, wherein five members of the board will be nominated by the President, would not guarantee independence of the agency.

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