All civil servants and public employees get a salary increase.

Salary has nothing to do with officials driving luxury cars and building mansions.

Recently, a National Assembly member proposed a starting salary of nearly 9 million VND for doctors. Previously, the Ministry of Education and Training also proposed to increase salaries for teachers. Do you think these proposals are reasonable and will this be taken into account in the Salary Reform Project to be submitted to the upcoming 7th Central Conference?

Education and health service units currently apply a common salary scale, higher than normal working conditions and preferential state policies with preferential allowances according to profession.

In education, civil servants receive a 25-70% professional allowance and receive an additional seniority allowance for teachers. In health care, they also receive the same allowance, in addition to income from health insurance and income from patient contributions.

In this project, we have researched the overall design of the entire salary and allowance system for all industries.

When submitting to the Central Committee, we only present the principles. Then, based on the approved Central Committee resolution, the competent authorities will develop specific documents to regulate the salary table, allowances, bonuses and the mechanism for creating resources for salary reform. Therefore, the issue of salaries and allowances in the education or health sector will be institutionalized by the competent authorities after the Central Committee issues the resolution.

For example, the National Assembly will issue a resolution on the salary system for National Assembly agencies, courts, and procuracies; the Government will issue a salary system for government-managed agencies; and the Party and mass organizations will have the Central Organizing Committee submit regulations to the Secretariat.

For a long time, officials and civil servants have talked about low salaries, but many officials have built mansions and driven luxury cars. Does this salary reform project mention this and address the situation of officials and civil servants being corrupt and demanding bribes due to low salaries?

I think salary reform and civil servants driving luxury cars and building mansions are not linked. Salary is just a benefit from the state, in addition, civil servants also have other incomes such as from economic activities.

To overcome that, it is necessary to implement regulations on anti-corruption in managing the income of people in public service.

Salary reform only contributes to anti-corruption, while anti-corruption, improving public ethics and professional responsibility must be solutions for managing civil servants.

Salaries of officials and civil servants will be significantly improved.

When the project is approved by the Central Committee and implemented, will the lives of civil servants be improved?

Certainly, when the project is approved and implemented in practice, the salaries of cadres and civil servants will be significantly improved, creating a new level where all cadres, civil servants and public employees will receive a salary increase.

However, there will be a rearrangement between occupations and ensuring priority, encouraging occupations with preferential policies from the state to have more incentives, and the current shortcomings such as too many allowances, salary regulations by coefficients... will be overcome.

At that time, salary will be the main thing, allowances will only account for a small part. In addition, there will be a bonus mechanism based on job position and work efficiency, which will create the initiative of the heads of agencies in salary payment.

The question many people are wondering is where will the money come from so that all officials, civil servants and public employees can get a salary increase?

Obviously, the number of people receiving salaries from the budget is too large but the budget is tight, which is an imbalance.

Therefore, to reform wages, one of the first and breakthrough tasks is to reorganize the apparatus, improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the state apparatus, the political system and improve the quality of operations of public service units towards autonomy.

In fact, the absolute size of the budget increases with economic growth, the GDP size and the salary fund are within the established regular expenditure level.

We also propose that every year, priority be given to spending about 50% of the estimated revenue increase and 70% of the local budget revenue increase, and about 40% of the central budget revenue increase on salary reform.

Thus, with the roadmap for restructuring the apparatus and increasing the scale of the regular expenditure fund, in which the salary fund has been determined, we will have resources to reform salaries.