Job order disorder

Guess which government body has been marked down in a lesson on staffing. State auditors who pored over its 2025 records whispered to Nosy Tarsee that the agency leaned so heavily on contractual workers that the practice could only be called “excessive.”

Nosy Tarsee’s little bird chirps that the trouble began when the auditors found that, although a 2020 joint circular bars contract-of-service and job order workers from performing regular and continuing functions or supervising career personnel, the agency kept such workers in precisely those roles.

In doing so, it put workforce stability and equitable pay at risk. The same circular encourages offices to assess staffing needs and regularize qualified personnel when long-term requirements exist, yet it apparently remained a document filed rather than followed.

The numbers raised the auditors’ eyebrows the most. Because the main office engaged 345 contractual workers in 2025, far exceeding both its authorized and filled plantilla positions, the auditors described its dependence as “substantial,” which is audit language for a habit that has stopped being an exception.

Meanwhile, the office serving the capital region employed 56 such workers to carry out its programs and paid them a 20 percent premium on top of basic compensation. An Eastern Visayas counterpart hired 81, of whom 25 held plantilla positions, leaving one to wonder who is contractual and who is not.

Why did this happen? The auditors say it is because no structured process existed for rationalizing the workforce and because nobody periodically checked whether the tasks handed to these workers remained temporary and project-based, as the rules require.

As a result, the agency stays exposed to workforce imbalance, weakened accountability, diminished organizational continuity, and constraints on sustaining the competence it needs to deliver its mandate.

Not that the money trail is any tidier. Although the agency reportedly paid P174.86 million to 401 contractual personnel, including premiums, the auditors told Nosy Tarsee that the disbursements lacked documents proving the salaries complied with the circular, meaning the figure is, for now, a number in search of a paper trail.

Worse, because the auditors also observed salary differentials amounting to P223,333.11 paid at the mountain-region office, the report suggests that classification and compensation were as inconsistent as the staffing itself.