After two decades of failed promises and ineffectual efforts, Bulgaria’s Customs Agency is set for sweeping structural and staff changes at the initiative of the agency’s new head, Vanyo Tanov, and Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov.

For years, media reports have been highlighting the obvious – that a number of customs officers, mainly those at border checkpoints with Serbia and Turkey, have living standards, including luxury cars, yachts and big houses, incompatible with their official salaries.

No previous government managed to offer a reasonable explanation why public officials could live so well on such low salaries. The result was that the term "customs officers" became a synonym for untouchable corrupt public officials, known mostly for colourful nicknames such as the Penguin or the Cotton. The main negative effect, despite the stated promises of all previous governments, has been that the public stopped believing that the system would undergo real change.

In just a few months, however, the new Government and Customs Agency (CA) management showed that such change was possible if the political will and appropriate vision were in place. When Tanov was appointed CA head, he got all the political support he needed from Prime Minister Boiko Borissov. As for the vision, Tanov got the support of Finance Minister Dyankov, who was brought back from his top post at the World Bank to do one major thing: cut public costs and staff, where needed, and boost efficiency.

Armed with these priorities, Tanov and Dyankov announced a plan to restructure the Customs Agency. It was called "A Concept for Customs Agency restructuring" and provided for the laying off of 657 CA officials and shutting down a number of CA bodies. Beyond the goals of cutting costs (saving 5.4 million leva a year) and improving efficiency, the concept said that the layoffs were also aimed at increasing the number of staff working on the field at the expense of middle management staff or, in other words, getting rid of all the well-known nicknames.

The layoffs were done after careful analysis and co-ordination with trade unions so that everything could be solid from a legal point of view. The CA even negotiated a million leva for financial compensation as a result of the job losses, which already have started and are to reach 15 per cent by the end of the year.     

For the remaining staff, Tanov and Dyankov had another manoeuvre. The simple solution of putting everyone to the test – literally.  A total of 2063 CA officials were asked to take a special assessment test on October 12 designed to evaluate their "conduct, professionalism and proficiencies".

Tanov said that the aim of the multiple-choice form, which included 40 questions, was to evaluate the service’s capabilities and then develop a programme to facilitate specialisation. When the results were announced on November 3, it became clear that the average CA officer’s result was mediocre. The results will be included in their files as a criterion in future layoffs. Assessment tests were also introduced as a hiring criterion by Tanov.

Ivan Kozhouharov, often referred to as the Penguin in Bulgarian media, decided to take one such test. Kozhouharov was dismissed from his post as deputy head of the customs at Kalotina border checkpoint with Serbia by the previous CA administration. Now he decided to apply for the post of head of the CA regional directorate in Sofia and Plovdiv. He was allowed into the first stage of the hiring contest, but when the list of the selected candidates was published on November 20, his name was absent.