BUREAUCRACY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

The term of public administration contains two words. The word of administration involves
organizing and maintaining human and fiscal resources to attract the goals of a particular
group. The word "public" means what refers to people, to a community or to society.

Public administration involves an activity, has tangency with politics, tends to be

concentrated in the executive branch of government, differs from the private administration
and is concerned with the administration of the law.

Bureaucracy is a term that refers either to the body of civil servants or to groups of people
with administrative and policy-making functions that govern the administrative system.
Bureaucracy is the administrative system that governs any large institution. Bureaucracies
have been criticized as ineffective and inflexible for people's needs.

From an etymological point of view, the term bureaucracy means the leadership of those who
work in the offices. Bureaucratic institutions operate on the principle of over and
subordination. The authority is gradually distributed to different bureaucratic levels. This way
of organizing enables decisions to be passed from the top to the lower levels. At the same
time, those who are administered by this system have the opportunity to challenge the
decision of a certain function at higher hierarchical levels. Administration of bureaucratic
institutions is carried out with the help of written documents, which allows the existence of a
bureaucratic memory. The official must have an employee relationship with the institution.

The separation between public and private spheres has worked in all situations where a
professional bureaucracy has developed. Occupation of public functions is only based on
specialized training and promotion is based only on competence and experience. Having a job
in a bureaucratic institution requires vocation.

Romania is recognized as a country where bureaucracy has mastered most fields of activity
(sanitary system, legal system, education system, etc.). There is no Romanian public
institution lacking the bureaucratic system that is generally felt in their administrative
activity. Apart from such problems faced by employees of public institutions in certain
moments of their activity, there may also be some organizational problems that only
aggravate bureaucracy. Regarding the activity with the external environment, the bureaucratic
system within the public institutions leads to the total lack of cooperation between the public
institutions and the external environment (investors, physical persons, legal persons, other
state institutions).

These problems usually arise when any person interested in conducting a particular activity
or wanting to find certain information comes into contact with the Romanian bureaucratic
system.

The main problems and bureaucratic effects faced by public institutions are:
1) Overloading departments with civil servants - there are many people in a single department
who have to perform a single job task, but if a problem is to be solved, it is imperative to pass
on to almost every person in that department . A solution must be found in this situation, the
dismissal of the public servant's surprise is not the one indicated.

2) "Paper Walking" - in most cases, many people, both employees and those who come in
contact with them, are bound by the bureaucratic system where they work to "walk" all sorts
of documents and files from a department in or from one state institution to another for
different purposes. This may aggravate the smooth running of the activities of the Romanian
public institutions and the efficiency in solving some problems.

3) Lack of communication between public institutions, their departments and between

officials in the same department or office.

4) Lack of transparency - is another problem faced by public institutions; is specific to

bureaucratic institutions and is manifested by the lack of information provided to those
directly interested in a particular problem or by providing incomplete information.
Bureaucrats take advantage of their status and the information they hold, even if they are
normally public, thus possessing some power over others.

5) Loss of documents - this is due to the lack of organization, the lack of efficiency of the
bureaucratic system; you may be missed during the circuit the document is going through.

6) The reluctance to use modern technology (computer, advanced operating systems,

advanced software) to carry out administrative tasks - because of the bureaucratic effects on
the current economic development, it is necessary to take certain measures to mitigate the
problems created by bureaucracy.

The most widespread form of bureaucracy in public administration is regress, inflexibility,

the routine of officials who are limited to applying a set of rigid rules, lack of imagination
and fear of liability.