44.1% of Spain's Central Administration Now Works Remotely

What your taxes fund: 162,828 civil servants in the AGE

A tweet antiestéticaturing images of public employees at lunchtime was enough to reopen the most profitable question in Spanish public debate: where are civil servants when they are needed? The answer does not fit in a photo. It fits in figures. 44.1% of the General State Administration staff works from home two, three or more days a week. And on the other side of the counter, one in three appointment requests never materializes.

The images that started the controversy were a montage

It is worth starting with the detail almost no one looks at. The images circulating as proof of administrative laziness were not photographs: they came from an image generator. The material itself reveals the trick if you look closely — poached eggs are not eaten with bananas and toast is not eaten with a spoon —. The montage worked anyway. Suspicion about public sector performance does not need evidence to exist; it has existed for decades.

How many civil servants work remotely in Spain?

The latest report by the Secretariat of State for Public Function — now dependent on the Ministry for Digital Transformation — places at 44.1% the AGE staff who perform their daily work from home several days a week, the highest since the modality was implemented as an energy saving and efficiency measure. In absolute numbers, the AGE has 162,828 staff members, considerably fewer than those imagining a hypertrophied central administration. Almost 60% of those working remotely are women.

The trend does not seem to be reversing: Justice has announced that its employees will be able to work remotely within a year and that trials will be telematic. For part of the public sector, this is savings and work-life balance. For another, it is the perfect excuse to never set foot in the office again.

Why has booking an appointment become the battlefield?

Because it is the only moment when the citizen touches the administration and, frequently, cannot find it. The OCU study on waiting times leaves an uncomfortable headline: one in three appointment requests leads nowhere. Some lawyers argue that mandatory appointments are illegal and contrary to the Constitution, while public personnel themselves warn that eliminating them would require increasing staff by around 30%.

86% of Spaniards believe that electronic bureaucracy excludes a large portion of the population, and more than half are not fully satisfied with the functioning of public services. Two data points that do not fit the narrative of digital efficiency at all costs.

The five-minute procedure and the month-long counter wait

Here lies the technical core of the matter. A procedure with an electronic certificate is resolved in five minutes; that same procedure, at the window, can cost a month of waiting and a sour face. Multiply this by the number of procedures that can already be closed online and the uncomfortable question appears: if the form already works, why are there still queues to register it?

Because the other side also exists. Those who attend to the public tell it without frills: elderly people getting lost in an electronic administration with usability that leaves much to be desired, people who have spent the morning traveling to the capital only to return with instructions they do not understand. Not everyone who arrives at the counter represents a procedure solved with two clicks.

Artificial intelligence knocks on the registry door

OpenAI announced it will develop artificial intelligence for the legal sector in 2024, trained and shaped according to the field where it will be employed. The circulating calculation — removing half of public employees with electronic certificates and four related things — is optimistic and probably false in its literalness. But it points in a direction: every procedure closed automatically is one less reason to sustain a counter, and every impossible appointment is one more incentive to automate.

Milei and the chainsaw: one million public employees in the crosshairs

In Argentina, the new president demanded total presence from public employees and threatened to fire one million of them, calling them parasites. The echo was immediate: some read it as a warning and others dismiss it as politics from another country. What is striking is that the discussion on remote work for public personnel has ceased to be a productivity issue to become a trust issue.

Waiting two hours to renew a passport: what can be done

Courts are backing sanctions for serious misconduct against public employees for discourtesy, and citizens have formal channels to complain about treatment or waiting times. Complaining sometimes works. Other times, the procedure ends up being slower than the problem it denounces, which says a lot.

The data that best portrays the bottleneck is not the remote work one. In a court registry, the admission of a lawsuit — robo de datos it, checking it is correct, and giving it a number — went from about ten days, four years ago, to six months or more. And there is a teacher who asked for early retirement at 60 and has a trial date at 64. By then, the procedure will no longer be necessary for anyone.