The Office of the Comptroller General of the State initiated eleven control actions against the same number of entities; of 5 already have reports and the rest are in process.
There were serious failures of some public institutions in the control of the telework days developed during the hardest months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and, therefore, it cannot be verified that, indeed, their servers have worked. This is determined by the reports of five audits carried out by the Office of the Comptroller General of the State to the same number of entities.
The control body examined to the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Pichincha Regional Office of the National Secretariat for Higher Education, Science and Technology (Senescyt), the Council of Higher Education (CES) and the House of Ecuadorian Culture, in the period between March 17, 2020 and May 31 of this year.
On March 12, 2020, days before former President Lenín Moreno ordered the confinement of citizens to avoid contagion, the Ministry of Labor issued Ministerial Agreement MDT-2020-076 on the “Guidelines for the application of emergent telework during the declaration of sanitary emergency ”. In this it states that “it is the responsibility of the employer, or its delegates, to establish the guidelines, control and monitor the activities that the emergent teleworker performs during the health emergency.”
But all the entities have in common the fact that there were no clear guidelines for verifying teleworking or strict monitoring of that.
Thus, in the case of the Ministry of Labor itself, The Comptroller’s Office explains that an instruction manual was issued in which it was stated that the area managers had to send to the servers the activities that they had to carry out during their working day through a “telework control and monitoring file” and, in turn , forward the compliance reports to the Human Talent department. But the frequency with which they should do it was not established; This was only corrected on October 20, 2020, when it was arranged to be weekly.
Likewise, a remote dialing computer system was not enabled for employees despite the fact that the one they use regularly, the Attendance Control System and registration of permits and overtime and supplementary hours (Sirha), does. The argument given by the authorities is that it could only be used “occasionally”.
In the Ministry of Education, The report says, the Human Talent area did not ask the Technology department to develop any computer tool to remotely control attendance and registration of vacations or permits.
How did you verify that people were working? According to the document, random calls were made by Microsoft’s Teams system, but there are no complete records.
Another novelty in this institution is that it is concluded, due to the absence of records, that there were some workers who did not have assignments in this period, and that no mechanism was determined to recover the hours not worked.
In the Senescyt There is also a remote dialing system in the Sirha tool they use, but this was not enabled for all collaborators, indicates the Comptroller’s Office.
Furthermore, “standardized formats” were not defined for recording and reporting the activities carried out by each worker; Some of them have inconsistencies, such as lack of signatures, or details of the work carried out, or evidence to support the reports.
And there is also no clarity in the requests for vacations and permits. Hence, one of the recommendations is to update this information to discount them.
At CES, on the other hand, It was established that the area managers had to send the reports of employee activities to Human Talent every fifteen days, but this was not fulfilled. There are officials who delivered them between 16 and 163 days after the limit set.
While the House of Culture he took advantage of a ‘mixed’ working day without permission from the Ministry of Labor. Thus, they had five face-to-face hours and three teleworking hours.
The directors argued that the institution is autonomous from the Executive Branch; and that during the emergency, the national and cantonal COEs were the authorities that regulated work and these, in turn, transferred to those of each entity the competence to set working hours and days.
The report indicates that there was also no computerized system to record attendance, to which they replied that it was “not an obligation” to establish it. In addition, no guidelines were established for the presentation of reports on teleworking activities, so the information is incomplete or repetitive.
At the moment, the Comptroller’s Office is conducting examinations of six other institutions: the ministries of Foreign Relations and Human Mobility, and of Economy and Finance, the Constitutional Court, the Superintendency of Banks, the Internal Revenue Service (SRI) and the Municipality of Rumiñahui.
According to the records made by employers in the Unified Labor System (SUT), there are currently 12,331 companies under the Labor Code and 262 public institutions, with the telework modality. The figure was provided by the Ministry of Labor in a request for information made by this newspaper.
“The teleworking modality had a significant increase in 2020, thus increasing the number of teleworkers by 40%,” said the institution.
When asked whether the ministry carried out any control over the correct compliance with schedules and connections in the public sector under the modality of teleworking, he replied that this corresponded to each institution, according to the Ministerial Agreement MDT-2020-076. (I)
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