The Comptroller’s Office carried out a Sectoral Study where it evaluated the role of the ICBF in guaranteeing the working conditions of community mothers and fathers, in which it was concluded that the majority of them who provide their services in the community modality of early childhood care , through operators, expect to have an improvement in their working conditions, which is why a technical and financial study of the fiscal impact of their normalization on the entity’s staff is required.
Main conclusions of the study
It was possible to identify, according to the responses to the 1,755 surveys carried out on community mothers and fathers, that the requirements related to improving their working conditions are aimed at:
- Direct hiring through the ICBF, without intermediation through operators, to guarantee job stability, as well as their rights to health and pension.
- Recognition of the Old Age Pension Bonus, for those mothers who have not met any of the requirements to access their pension.
- Salary increase, since they currently earn 1 minimum salary, in addition to the recognition of salary categories, according to their academic profile, years of experience, and overtime pay.
- Provision for personal use and for the Community Home.
- Recognition of subsidies for the payment of rents, for those community mothers and fathers who make use of their place of residence for the care of the Community Home.
- Access to technological tools, to comply with the reports required by the operator, which are required in digital media.
- Improvement and optimization of the physical infrastructure of Community Homes, to guarantee an adequate provision of the service to early childhood.
missing controls
Regarding the supervision of contracts with operators under the ICBF’s responsibility, said supervision is limited to a purely administrative control, leaving aside financial and legal supervision, a circumstance that limits the timely solution of problems, in order to guarantee provision of early childhood services under normal conditions.
It is evident that a correct verification of the profiles of the people linked as community mothers and fathers is not carried out, nor is there a control and follow-up of their adequate hiring and correct payment of social benefits.
In the process of verifying the effectiveness of the ICBF management, inconsistencies were found in the information provided by the Institute regarding the budget execution in the community modality in the periods 2016 to 2022, greater than $40 billion pesos.
This situation reveals the possible materialization of risks that may lead to losses in public resources, since the entity is not certain of the resources executed in the program.
The differences between the information provided by the ICBF, compared to the data from the SPI investment project monitoring system, amount to more than $9 billion pesos.
The CGR makes an urgent call to the ICBF, in order to strengthen the systems of collection, administration and control of information between the different territorial and the central level, in order to guarantee its veracity and correspondence with reality. Without adequate monitoring and control instruments, the entity will continue to suffer from measurement systems to determine the impacts of early childhood public policy, executed throughout the national territory.
Fiscal risks due to possible direct involvement of community mothers and fathers
Faced with the announcements of the National Government, regarding normalization processes of the labor relationship of community mothers and fathers in the ICBF plant, materialized in Articles 137 and 139 of the PND 2022-2026 “Colombia, world power of life”a call is also made for the ICBF to carry out the pertinent technical and financial studies that lead to the determination of the fiscal impact of the processes of progressive and gradual formalization of the more than 40,000 community mothers and fathers who provide their services in the community modality, as well as subsistence allowances for community and substitute ex-mothers and fathers, in accordance with the Medium-Term Fiscal Framework and the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework.
The foregoing, taking into account that, in the projections made by the CGR, it is observed that there could be a fiscal impact on the ICBF budget of approximately $1 billion additional pesos in each term, without taking subsistence subsidies into account. , about which the Comptroller is not certain, because there are no technical and economic studies by the entity.
The CGR will be attentive to the development of the efforts carried out by the ICBF to guarantee compliance with Articles 137 and 139 of the PND 2022-2026, so that the provision of services to early childhood in the country is carried out in compliance of the principles of efficiency, effectiveness and opportunity.
