On April 29, Grodno / Olga Belyavskaya - BELTA /. Belarus needs serious measures for debureaucratization. This was stated today by the Deputy Prime Minister of Belarus Anatoly Tozik at a seminar for heads of republican media, according to a BELTA correspondent. "We need to focus maximum efforts on debureaucratizing the country," said the Deputy Prime Minister. "We are so bogged down in an abundance of paperwork, correspondence. Two-thirds of this correspondence is absolutely unnecessary." According to Anatoly Tozik, this distracts people, stifles initiative. "We pretend that we are all busy, moving this paperwork from office to office, and go home with a sense of accomplishment," he added. "I said at a government meeting that we are proud that we work 12-14 hours, sometimes including Saturdays and Sundays. However, we should not be proud of this, we should be ashamed of it." This is simply an inability to organize one's work and the work of one's employees, he said. Colossal work is also to be done on decentralization and streamlining the decision-making process. To solve the tasks set, an appropriate regulatory framework and the desire of officials are necessary, emphasized Anatoly Tozik. In his opinion, employees of state administration bodies "need to take a specific issue and, if it is a standard one, resolve it quickly on a national scale." According to the Deputy Prime Minister, measures are needed to stimulate initiative and labor efficiency. Special attention should be paid to overcoming the fear of enterprise managers to make serious decisions. "We often encounter the reluctance of a manager to take responsibility and make a decision," he noted. "This should not be the case." In the coming years, Belarus plans measures for further simplification of the tax system and improvement of accounting. According to Anatoly Tozik, they are among the most complex in the world. Actions are being taken in the country to resolve this situation. "For example, we recently reduced the number of mandatory accounting documents from 1600 to 8," he recalled. The Deputy Prime Minister added that officials should work more actively with citizens' appeals. "The state must be very attentive to the citizen, but there must also be a balance in this matter," said Anatoly Tozik, adding that some complaints and appeals from people to government agencies are unfounded. -0-

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