Six years. That is how long, according to the Interior Ministry's criminal complaint, an employee of the Administrative Affairs Department in Skopje used her official access code to enter licence categories for people who did not meet the requirements. From 3 September 2020 to 24 August 2026. Twenty-one people received a licence they had not earned, and one more case stopped at an attempt.

But the heaviest part of this story is not the number of licences. The heaviest part is that the same employee had already been removed from that post once, for exactly this. In February 2021 she was suspended, then dismissed from the ministry, over a criminal complaint for abuses in issuing personal documents. And on 15 January 2025, on the basis of a court ruling, she was brought back - to the same department, with the same authorisations, with the same access code.

The system that returned itself to the scene of the crime

Read that again. The state removed her, the court reinstated her, and she carried on. The period named in the complaint starts in 2020 and ends in 2026 - meaning the offence, according to the suspicions, did not stop even while she was outside the system, but resumed the moment the system opened its doors to her again.

Who made that decision to reinstate her? The court issued a ruling, that much is clear. But who at the ministry then judged that a person with an open criminal complaint for abusing personal documents should go back into the very department that issues personal documents? A court ruling orders a return to work - it does not order the return of the same access code with the same powers.

Four middlemen and one network

The ministry established that four people acted as intermediaries: they found interested drivers, connected them to the clerk and coordinated the procedure all the way to approval in the electronic system. So this was not a favour done for a relative or a friend, but an organised channel with its own people on the ground.

In total, 27 people have been reported. In the employee's case there are grounds for 22 counts of "forging a document" and one attempt. The rest are suspected of complicity. Six went a step further - they used those licences to cross the state border, and two of them also obtained certificates of professional competence for drivers in international transport of passengers and goods.

This is the part that should worry you

A certificate of professional competence for international passenger transport means a person is entitled to drive a bus full of people across a border. Two men obtained that entitlement on the basis of a licence they would, according to the complaint, never have received through the regular route. It is not known how many kilometres they have already driven, or with how many passengers.

The ministry notified the Transport Ministry and requested extraordinary inspection of the legal entities that run training or act as intermediaries in issuing such certificates, as well as a review of the legality of those already issued. That is the correct next step, but it arrives six years late.

The prosecution is seeking detention for the employee and two others, has proposed precautionary measures for 17, and seven suspects are unreachable by the prosecuting authorities. Seven people on the run from a case uncovered inside the ministry's own house.

The ministry also announces disciplinary proceedings with suspension until they conclude. Five years after the first suspension. The question that remains is not whether there will be proceedings - there will. The question is whether anyone will check how many other access codes in that same system have been working all these years without a single person looking at them.