Employees of the Health Insurance Fund were banned from whispering about their summer party, and photos that had already reached social media were swiftly deleted when the scandal broke. The institution's director and communications department, however, spent a long time dodging questions about the cost, claiming it was still unknown. But it's hard to believe that public sector events are held with a "blank check" — budgets are set and must be followed. Most likely, they hoped to buy time by stalling, in order to cool public interest or come up with a suitable response.

The Health Insurance Fund's party is hardly an exception. Just six months ago, I asked ministries and their subordinate agencies about their Christmas parties, and the costs of those events were hardly any less than the Fund's summer blowout. But that's not the real issue here.

We need to talk about communication. Many agencies, to avoid "misunderstandings," insisted on responding only in writing. When it came to naming the costs, they hemmed and hawed, offering long-winded justifications. Summer and winter parties are most often referred to as "seminars" to disguise their mainly entertainment-oriented nature as something more work-related. And this same pattern has repeated year after year.

Yet while these agencies send out a steady stream of press releases trumpeting even their smallest achievements, not a single word is ever shared about a ministry or subordinate agency holding an appreciation event or winter seminar for X amount of money — an event where, for two days, the proverbial plug is pulled from the wall. Getting that information is like pulling teeth via formal requests. And when the cost is finally extracted, it comes accompanied by a lengthy explanation that these are essential events for boosting team spirit. But if that's truly the case, why hide, downplay or disguise them? Announce them just as proudly as a minister's visit to the neighboring county!

Considering how many communications people are on staff — plus the external communications partners hired through procurement — it can't be a matter of lacking the capacity to prepare a press release about a staff appreciation event. This is about choices.

Publicly funded agencies simply do not want the public to know about their internal events or their costs. Because maybe, just maybe, the public would "misunderstand" them — especially in the current economic climate. But isn't that the first sign that these events should perhaps be held with more modest budgets so there's nothing to be embarrassed about in the first place?

In the case of the Health Insurance Fund, where most employees work from home, team spirit could just as well be boosted by having everyone meet in the office one day (perhaps gathered around the new, fancy taps) and actually put faces to names. Imagine the great press release and group photo that could come out of that! Everyone would nod along approvingly: good engagement!

We keep hearing the mantra that the state has no money for this or that. There isn't enough for healthcare, newspapers can't be delivered to home mailboxes, disability benefit decisions have to be cut back, meaning support money disappears. But if there's a need to install a sparkling water tap that automatically signals when to add more carbon dioxide, the money somehow appears. Or if there's a social media group criticizing a state-owned company — as in Omniva's case — it's no problem to spend around €10,000 (we don't know the exact figure; it's classified) to buy it up and control its content.

All in all, these are small amounts — but it's about the public's threshold for pain and sense of fairness, sharpened by earlier painful decisions. And if agency heads, communications staff or PR firms bought with public money can't grasp this, no amount of money will be enough to magically smooth over the deep sense of injustice created by past actions.

And speaking of communications procurements — here, the spending is on another level entirely compared to summer or winter party budgets. Here, money is no object. Communications contracts are used to find outside partners for all kinds of state propaganda, whether the initiative is large or small, important or trivial, for the purpose of coming up with bells and whistles with which to grab the attention of the media and the public.

Naturally, this is not cheap — attention is hard to get, especially when there's nothing substantive to say. It requires all sorts of tricks and gimmicks, from slogans to logos, from "engagement activities" to launching podcasts that hardly anyone listens to but are fun to make. The point? It may be listed somewhere as a department's performance metric.

But does the state really need to market and promote every sub-activity of every program, no matter how minor or uninteresting, as if its life depended on it? Is this a reasonable expense at a time when the same state is raising taxes so much that the cost of living is climbing noticeably not over years or months, but days?

The broader aim of these communications procurements is to create a situation where the media and the public talk only about these "positive initiatives" and "positive nudges" — which are not always important or life-changing — and not about the problems, mistakes or harmful decisions that would be good to mentally prepare for, or the outright reckless overspending of taxpayer money.

That is why more and more ministry documents are stamped "for internal use only," so the public won't catch wind of what's actually being cooked up behind the façade of controlled information flow. It means keeping important, life-changing decisions away from public view — that's the "crisis communication readiness" eagerly procured from the private sector.

So for all these millions of euros that are so freely spent, what we end up with is a state that's increasingly opaque, with an ever-narrowing trickle of meaningless information flowing in one direction, meant to smother critical thinking, while every leak that could let negative information slip out is plugged or bought up.

It's the dream of a silent era, where the public knows only about the "positive program" being carried out under ministers' wise leadership. As long as we have strong newsrooms and citizens with a conscience who cannot keep quiet about the wrongs done behind closed doors, this dream will not succeed. But the public sector's efforts to make it reality are becoming ever more costly for taxpayers.

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