Those who have been granted the status of disabled persons in Bulgaria are somewhere from 500 000 to 800 000, according to senior government officials.

Their exact number, however, is unknown moving the government to set up a unified data base on disabled people in a bid to limit suspected abuses.

The data base will be completed in October 2012, announced Monday Mincho Koralski, head of the Bulgarian Agency for Disabled Persons. It is going to put together data from the National Expert Doctors' Commission (NELK), the Employment Agency, the social security system, and several ministries.

NELK, which grants disability status to people, and its local units in particular, known as TELK, have been notorious for abuses, with suspicions of corruption leading to disability status and the respective state pensions for healthy people.

"Our goal is also to figure out the social and education status of the disabled people. This will allow us to improve our policies," Koralski said Monday, as cited by BTA.

"We currently have about 250 000 people with disabilities who have been left out of the labor market. We cannot afford to leave so many people out of the work force. We need to fight the stigma that a disabled person cannot work. There are people who are 100% disabled, but still work full time," he argued.

The new data base register of disabled persons in Bulgaria will be funded under the EU Human Resource Development Program and the European Social Fund, Labor Minister Totyu Mladenov explained.

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