The Troika-agreed plan to close 50% of Portugal’s Finanças offices, and sharply reduce the civil service headcount as a result, has quietly been shelved as the government again bows to unions pressure over the predicted level of job losses.
The public-facing tax office service will be reorganised later this year but not as first announced which had the tax workers union preparing for widespread strike action and consumer groups in uproar, especially for those customers living in rurual areas of the country.
All of the country’s tax offices now are to stay open after the Government submitted an alternative reorganisation plan of public services which will involve 'changing roles for employees, but not redundancies,' to which the Troika allegedly agreed before its exot last weekend, but the saving must come from somewhere.
Various schemes to serve customers are being trialled such as a bizarre door-to-door system to bring taxpayers to services by taxi, vans or buses at the cost of the tax department which in turn is funded by the taxpayer.
Besides this trial the Government proposes also to create public service vans in areas of lower population density for tax and other matters.
A new strategic model is being developed which sees service further concentrated in Citizen Shops that already exist in each council area.
How this will save money remains to be explained yet annual savings of €127 million are predicted mainly from integrating back office functions, setting up something called ‘Citizen Space’ and putting more services online - an intention that sent shivers through the taxpaying community as the current online system simply fails to work correctly at peak times, thus increasing the level of fines the government can charge for the late submission of tax returns.
The savings from some reorganisation will be nowhere near the savings originally agreed from the closure of half of the country’s tax offices, and that money will have to come from savings elsewhere or, more likely, from tax increases.
The fact that no civil service jobs will be lost continues the government’s lip service to the Troika-agreed plan of reducing the state employee head count and is another victory for the tax workers union over an increasingly enfeebled Secreatary of State, Paulo Nuncio.
The winners are those in rural areas without access or skills to use the Finanças web portal. Many tax payments of course can be made at Post Offices but with more of these closing every month in another 'reorganisation' the cost of fulfilling obligations to the state for many citizens is becoming prohibitive.
