Essentially, the responsibilities of the Police Board, the Citizenship and Migration Board, and the Border Guard have been interconnected for a long time. The merger of the three institutions was legally executed on 1 January 2010 with the launch of a single Police and Border Guard Board (PPA).

The merger is without doubt a necessary development that will help us to achieve a new quality of internal security services and to further improve the cooperation between different functions. Until now, the three institutions all had separate accounting, human resources and administrative functions, whereas now they have a shared support system. The savings on the reorganisation of the support functions will help us provide additional forces for our main activities. It will allow us to allocate more resources for improved everyday security.

The Police and Border Guard Board is a new institution, but the objective of our operation was and always will be the same - a safer Estonia.

The merger of the institutions does not entail any significant changes in the communication with the organisations. The service procedure will remain unchanged and all current services will continue to be available during the transition period as well as after that. At the same time, we will continue to develop the services for a more comprehensive and customer-friendly service.

We are always striving to make sure that law-abiding citizens can feel safe in Estonia. To do this, we must ensure fast and reliable operation in many important processes, such as personal identification, issue of documents, safeguarding of the external border of the EU, and crime prevention and detection.

As a single organisation we will be stronger and more vigorous in our operation, and we will achieve more in our efforts to ensure internal security.

Raivo Küüt
Director General of the Police and Border Guard Board
April 1, 2010

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