MONTEVIDEO (Uypress) – This Friday the Association of Social Security Workers (ATSS) released a statement in which they denounced a “dismantling of the BPS” due to a restructuring of the institution in which the agency’s benefits are transferred to private entities.
The communiqué warns that the restructuring plan has not been approved by the Board of the BPS but that, nevertheless, “it is being carried out in practice.”
“To the non-entry of personnel or replacement of vacancies, there has been added a continuous suppression of positions that respond to a “resizing” and “restructuring” of the entire organization and that includes a relocation of officials, who are no longer affected/ as to the face-to-face attention of the population, causing delays, unnecessary bureaucracy, lack of agendas and an increasingly growing obligation of the population to use Web services”, they pointed out.
“In all the offices of BPS there are delays in agendas and attention due to lack of personnel”, underlines the text, which explains that this situation is due to “cuts, new forms of bureaucratization and lack of personnel” linked to the “covert restructuring” plan. .
It also reports that these changes will be implemented throughout the country: “In Montevideo, two of our branches will no longer attend to asset procedures and liabilities in another three”, which will cause the population to have difficulties when resolving their procedures, they explain. They add that in the interior it was defined that three branches -in Carmelo, Trinidad and San Carlos- will stop working and will begin to fulfill relocated tasks.
These changes have already begun to take place in the capital, while in the interior of the country they will begin after Tourism Week: “We denounce the intentions of the authorities of the BPS to carry out the privatization of the loans to liabilities that our organization carries out. According to what we know through informal channels, it is being studied to transfer this service to the collection networks,” says the union.
“Just as in the past it was carried out with the Personal Contract (creation of a user that allows access to all personal information), in this instance it is intended to continue with the dismantling of the BPS transferring our benefits and services to private companies. In this way, the confidentiality and guarantees that the BPS workers provide to our population in our actions as public officials are being completely violated and causing new expenses and costs that do not specify how they will be transferred, nor who will pay for them.”
“It is known that private companies in each case in which they are granted the power to act as intermediaries in BPS procedures and payments charge money for each movement,” declares the union group, and adds: “As a union we are facing a violation of Collective Bargaining by not being informed or communicated, without establishing areas for exchange by the Administration, as well as an absolute lack of dialogue with the Board of Directors as a whole”. “The workers of the Association of Social Security Workers see ourselves in the obligation to publicly denounce this situation, having not received responses in the formal areas of negotiation, which have been absolutely violated, in which we received responses false before the consultations”, concludes the union.
