He wants to hire a detective agency to monitor municipal officials who are low. The Consistory has initiated the procedure to tender a minor contract whose base is 14,999 euros plus VAT, that is, 18,148 euros. The process is promoted by the Human Resources Department, directed by María Hernández, and the duration will be for a year. At that time, the company that is done with the work will have to monitor the house and the places that frequent a minimum of ten workers in temporary disability. , although the period can be extended, according to the report that motivates the need for this contract, whose process was made public on Tuesday, August 5. The presentation of offers ends next Monday.
“The reason for the contract is the high absenteeism that presents certain municipal services, well above the country’s average rate,” says the document that can be consulted in the State contracting platform and with letterhead of the City of Fuengirola, whose mayor is Ana Mula, of the. Municipal sources ensures that the absenteeism rate has been around 10% and that above all it affects the operational services and cleaning. They add that this is not the only measure implemented by the Consistory to combat the situation: it has also requested reports to the labor mutual and the health surveillance service to delve into measures that result in the improvement of the health of workers. “For the government team it is important to guarantee the residents of Fuengirola that there is an efficient use of public resources and that there is no misuse of public money,” the same sources underline, which defend the legality of the contract. “It is something novel, because the administration does not usually hire these services, but there is no illegality in it,” insists Antonio Carrillo, of the Carrillo Office Private Detectives ,. “There are many cases,” he says.
The text includes that it is an “exceptional measure”, “that its immediate repetition is not expected” and that aims to “research and monitor workers in temporary disability or with a suitable report with limitations”, whose names will be proposed by the Personnel Management Service. The minimum of workers – which charge 100% of their salaries while they are low – to be monitored by the company that is made with the award in Fuengirola will be ten, although when assigning the contract the municipality values with more points – until 40% of the total – to the more officials it is carried out. (The remaining 60% of the valuation is the economic proposal: at less price, more points). The idea is that detectives follow public employees from their own home and the places they can frequent. The purpose is none other than “verifying and being able to demonstrate in a reliable way if it performs any activity on their own or own or any other activity incompatible with the situation of temporary disability or limitation of aptitude (wandering, weight load, limb movement or trunk, driving vehicles, etc.),” says the municipal document.
The contract emphasizes that the follow -ups will have a minimum of three days so that the facts can be verified and demonstrated – if they exist – unless from the municipal human resources department a lower number of days considers sufficient. In other cases, the period can also grow when the City Council considers that minimum of three days insufficient. Then “an application for monitoring will be made and the proportional part of other unrealized follow -ups will be deduced that are part of the contract.”
Addresses, telephones or social networks
Before becoming their shadow, detectives must carry out a previous research work on the person they will follow. According to the document, it is about “corroborating the data provided by the City Council” as well as checking if there are other homes, telephones, workplaces, incidents that may appear on official pages or social networks “that can provide added value to the monitoring”. This previous analysis must be incorporated into the final report, “it must be reflected in which it has positive (indicating which ones are) and in which negative (expressly indicating their absence or the impossibility of knowing them).”
“The monitoring to be done must be the same if what is sought is to demonstrate activities, bodily movements or other actions incompatible with the situation that gives rise to the situation of temporary disability or limitation of its aptitude in your workplace,” adds the contract, which says that the monitoring must be designed to “evidence in a very clear way that the worker is doing his usual work activity or any other.” “They will never be enough facts that presuppose it without a clear and direct link with the facts that are intended to prove,” concludes the text.
The Fuengirola City Council, with a staff of personnel formed by about 800 employees, is not the first to make this type of contracts, but it is a rarity in the tenders of public administrations. There are hardly any cases, although the last autumn of the City of Alcorcón allocated 16,940 euros to the hiring of a private detective company. , where the hiring of AZ Detectives was approved – it was the one chosen among the three companies that were presented to the offer – to investigate, also, employees with long -term work casualties.
In 2023, the PSOE denounced in Córdoba that the Municipal Buses company, Aucorsa, also used a private detective to monitor a driver who was decreased due to work disability. He was fired, but a court declared dismissal as inadmissible, according to Europa Press. The agency also states that the Pontevedra City Council hired a surveillance service to investigate an official of the Municipal Fire Extinction Service that had been bass for several months. “The purpose of this procedure, from our point of view, was to scare or intimidate workers not to commune with the impositions that come from this municipal government,” said the spokesman for the Personnel Board, Héctor Santaló.
