Annex . Progress in structural reform

Modify public procurement practices to select the contractors offering the best value for money rather than the lowest price. Focus procurement decisions on a mix of prices and technical bid details, including environmental impact assessments. Enhance staff skills to deal with complex selection criteria.

The Public Procurement Office is collecting data to assess the environmental, social and to some extent innovative aspects of public procurement, but without performing impact evaluation analyses.

Make the judicial environment friendlier to class actions in cases of competition breaches. Accelerate the functioning of the judicial system to shorten the time between the Competition Authority’s decisions and a final court decision in antitrust cases.

Two laws passed in 2017 facilitate the use of class actions. First, a law passed on 21 April 2017 regulates the liability in case of infringement of competition in civil proceedings. Second, a law passed on 7 April 2017 amended previous acts to facilitate debt enforcement so as to make class actions more available and efficient.

Reduce anti-competitive pressures resulting from the participation of Polish Airports State Enterprise (PPL) in many airport entities, and consider long-term concession agreements or privatisation for airport entities. Privatise the national air carrier (LOT).

No action taken.

Deepen financial development through a consolidation of co-operative banks and an improved legal framework for collateral.

The Polish Financial Supervision Authority recommends a consolidation of cooperative banks.

Improve tax compliance, and cut tax expenditures. Simplify tax regulations. Reinforce the monitoring and enforcement of the tax system. Eliminate the preferential regimes for the self-employed, and link their social security contributions to their actual earnings. Broaden tax bases by introducing cash registers for all professional services to improve VAT collection and by significantly tightening eligibility for the lump-sum income tax. Extend the social insurance contribution base to uncovered earnings. To improve tax compliance set up strong central management for the tax authority, improve coordination, invest in ICTs and focus more resources on auditing large taxpayers.

Additional revenues are being generated through better tax compliance from VAT and CIT. This reflects a set of measures designed at preventing tax fraud in intra-EU fuel trade, a new system for monitoring of the road freight transport of specific goods (e.g. fuel and tobacco), and a detailed automated analysis of tax accounts. The tax and customs administrations were merged into the National Revenue Administration. Poland is gradually broadening the use of cash registers to cover more and more goods and services and is also working on an online cash register system.

Allow the public employment services to hire more skilled staff, and ensure that overall resources are better allocated to front-line placement tasks. Promote the adoption of best practices through performance management and benchmarking of providers.

No action taken.

Rationalise ALMPs by focusing more on job-search assistance, career guidance and work schemes having a high training content. Improve job-seeker profiling. Reduce passive social assistance by making more transfers (such as childcare subsidies) conditional in part on being employed or seeking work. Expand the scope of private employment services.

Under EU-funded operations, social assistance institutions are setting up monitoring tools for their programmes to improve job seekers situation on the labour market and their social situation.

Consider merging local labour offices with unemployment benefits and social assistance administration to create a one-stop shop and more fundamentally to integrate the management of those activities. Enhance coordination and automatic exchange of information between local labour offices, firms, assistance centres and education institutions.

Under EU-funded programmes, the social assistance administration and local labour offices are obliged to cooperate to better address their clients’ needs and potential.

Refrain from increasing the minimum-to-average wage ratio. Consider differentiating the minimum wage across regions depending on local labour-market conditions. Reduce wage rigidities by bringing the effects of age and education on public-sector wages closer to private-sector standards.

The minimum wage increased by 8.1% in January 2017 and 5% in January 2018 so that the projected minimum-to-average wage ratio is expected to be broadly stable in 2017-18.

Consider introducing an earned-income tax credit to marginal groups’ work incentives.

No action taken

Eliminate pre-retirement schemes, and prevent disability pensions from becoming attractive relative to old-age pensions. Remove the prohibition to lay off workers less than four years before retirement. Scale back survivors’ pensions to reduce the labour tax wedge.

The possibility to obtain disability pension after reaching pension age was abolished since 1 December 2017.

Promote the employment of people with disability by: reducing the employment quota of 6% and raising the penalty for firms failing to reach the revised level; and better training and activating workers with disabilities.

No action taken.

Broaden access to care and reduce inequality by: targeting extra resources at shortening waiting lists; extending dental services covered by public insurance; introducing co-payments on medical services while imposing a means-tested cap on the level of out-of-pocket payments; and increasing transparency of dual physician employment in the public and private sectors.

The government adopted a law that came into effect on 1 January 2018 to increase public healthcare spending by 2025 to 6% relative to GDP two years earlier. From 2016, the programme Medicines 75+ has provided access to free medicines for patients over 75 years old.

Improve the allocation and use of current resources by: shifting resources from hospitals to primary and long-term care, potentially by integrated health-care delivery models; strengthening the gate-keeping role of primary medicine; providing clearer incentives to hospitals to make them respect their financial commitments and rationalise the use of their resources; promoting the development of hospital management skills; and streamlining the responsibilities of the NFZ and central and local governments.

Key measure amending the health care system include:

• Change in the primary healthcare organization system (POZ) based on the Act on primary health care (POZ) which entered into force in December 2017;

• Introduction of hospitals network (HN) operating since October 2017;

• Introduction of the Healthcare Needs Maps for hospital care (in April 2016) and for 30 disease groups (December 2016 and December 2017).

Develop a comprehensive strategy to address growing long-term care needs. Avoid labour shortages in the health-care sector by: training more staff; improving retention, particularly through better management policies and delaying retirement; enhancing re-integration in the health workforce of those who have left it; adopting a more efficient skills mix by enhancing the role of advanced practice nurses and physicians’ assistants; improving productivity, in particular by linking pay to performance; and developing targeted immigration policies.

Solutions implemented to tackle labour shortages in the healthcare sector include an increase in the number of places available for medical students by nearly 1500 and the adoption of the Act on the minimum salaries for health-care employees. Moreover, as of 2017 a dialogue between the Minister of Health, graduates of medical studies, nurses and midwives as well as trade unions is conducted to improve the effectiveness of healthcare personnel management.