The Council for Transparency (CPLT) carried out a report on municipal overtime, between the period of December 2020 and November 2021, identifying payments of over 51 billion pesos, distributed in 84% of the country’s municipalities (288 of 345) who were part of the process. They also evidenced cases in which the extra daytime hours indicated by the norm are exceeded.
The process promoted by the agency made it possible to establish at a general level that, in the group of municipalities and period analyzed, the number of overtime hours worked was 11 million, and that of the total number of municipal officials who worked overtime, the largest proportion corresponds to contracted under the plant modality (50%) and belonging to the municipal sector (57%).
The president of the CPLT, Francisco Leturiasaid that “with this mapping or x-ray we were able to identify not only how overtime is used and paid, but also put background information on the table to carefully analyze what is happening in this regard with public employment and with the ways of doing municipalities in this area.
“The use of overtime should be, according to what the regulations establish, the exception and not the rule, and it is not what we see from a general view of the situation of most municipalities,” he added.
Likewise, he pointed out that “the amount of overtime that is reported here is of such magnitude that it confirms an open secret: that it is a mechanism to increase the salaries that are considered low for many officials and that cannot be modified because the law requires it. prevents”.
“Then, the way to fatten them up is with overtime that no one controls. Some are not even careful with math and put more hours into the day than there are. The amount of money spent on overtime is obscene and surprising.” Leturia commented.
One in five employees worked overtime
Another of the findings of the audit pointed to the number of people, amounts paid and types of officials who are assigned to execute overtime between December 2020 and November 2021.
In this regard, the CPLT was able to show that on average, one out of every five municipal officials worked overtime on a monthly basis, receiving an average of 189,000 pesos per month for this concept. In addition, each overtime hour worked had an average value in the eleven months of $4,604 pesos.
To conclude, Leturia stressed that “we put the focus on establishing the level of access and quality of information on the use and payment of overtime, and first of all on records of overtime hours that could exceed what the current law proposes, which establishes a maximum of 40 hours per month during daytime hours, for example”.
“The legality or illegality of this is a matter that corresponds to the Comptroller’s Office to determine, so we have already brought these results to the attention of the agency, because we have to consider that there may be exceptions as indicated by the norm,” he concluded.
