The Ministry of the Interior has spent over CZK 870 million on professionalising and improving the quality of the civil service. However, it did not achieve the desired effect
PRESS RELEASE ON AUDIT NO 24/28 – 23 February 2026
Almost 61% of civil service authorities* failed to implement the required minimum standard for effective authority management within the set deadline. The desired digitalisation of civil servant training and of the civil service examinations has not been achieved. The Civil Service Information System does not provide the data needed to assess the state of the civil service. The SAO discovered this when it audited more than CZK 873 million spent by the Ministry of the Interior (MoI) between 2015 and 2024 in connection with the professionalisation and improvement of the quality of the civil service and the performance of public administration.
All civil service authorities were to implement minimum standards for effective office management and performance improvement by the year 2022, as ordered by the government. As a coordinator of the civil service, the MoI was tasked with assisting them and spent more than CZK 60 million from the European project Promoting the professionalisation and quality of the civil service and state administration (known as PROAK in Czech) on these efforts. However, the activities of the MoI did not lead to the expected improvement in quality management. In total, 51 out of 84 authorities (almost 61%) did not achieve the required minimum by the set deadline. Moreover, the third worst result was reported by the MoI itself, which scored only five points out of the requested minimum of eighteen.
Since February 2022, the MoI was tasked with setting up and maintaining an “education platform” for improving the expertise of civil servants. By providing them with online training and keeping records of completed courses, this platform was supposed to help save financial resources. Yet, the Ministry has not set up this platform and is not continuing creating a central e-learning education programme.
Similarly, the digitalisation of the civil service examination has not been achieved to the required extent either. Though the MoI did develop and app called eZkouška and launched it in September 2019, its service was completely terminated in November 2023, after the PROAK project ended. The reasoning behind this was, among other things, that there was no technical support for the app. Therefore, after four years, the civil service examination has returned to its paper-based format. Since the MoI has spent more than CZK 22 million on the eZkouška app and the subsequent modification of the Civil Service Information System, the SAO considers this behaviour as uneconomical and evaluates the Ministry’s actions as evidence of a breach of budgetary discipline.
In the years 2015–2024, the MoI spent a total of CZK 640 million on the creation, operation and development of the Civil Service Information System. Yet the system does not provide all data needed for evaluation of the civil service, and it takes a large portion of its data from other systems. A substantial amount of information also needs to be entered into the system manually. Moreover, the MoI works with the system only in a limited capacity. A whole range of data for evaluating the civil service is instead collected by questionnaires, and the subsequent processing and assessment of these questionnaires requires additional costs. The SAO has assessed that the expenditure, amounting to CZK 640 million, was incurred with reduced efficiency.
Since 2020, the MoI has failed to fulfil its obligation to measure and evaluate the performance of public and state administration. After years of inaction, this task has been taken away from the Ministry by the government. As a result, data on the quality of state administration is still missing. Following a comprehensive amendment to the Civil Service Act, the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic has taken over the coordination of the civil service as of this year.
Communication Department
Supreme Audit Office
*Civil service authorities include ministries, tax offices, land registry offices, labour offices, social security administration, etc.