He is a lawyer, property administrator, administrative manager, civil, commercial, and labor mediator. For 10 years, Fernando Santiago has presided over the Official College of Administrative Managers and has headed the General Council of Associations of Administrative Managers of Spain for six years. My motto is service, service, service. To the collegiate so that they can do their job better, to the citizen and the Administration, explains Santiago, who has seen how professionals who dedicate themselves to counseling have been overwhelmed by the pandemic.
There are 6,000 agencies spread throughout the national territory that employ 50,000 people. We treat a million and a half self-employed and we are very clear about the pulse of the street. Today, there are no means or illusion, and yes a lot of fatigue, he says and foresees that in the coming months “the number of companies with problems will skyrocket due to the economic crisis caused by the covid. We must start thinking in terms of a small entrepreneur and legislate helping SMEs to get ahead.
The health pandemic has meant a radical change for companies and institutions. Around 300,000 people still do not receive the subsidy from the temporary employment regulation files (ERTE) and Santiago points out, Its management is the administrative cross. There are 755,000 workers left in ERTE, of which 400,000 are in ghost companies, financially dead As a result of a ruling that has just come out of the Supreme Court that says that ERTEs are void in economically unviable companies, we can find more than half a million cases like this. Creditors’ bankruptcies and company closings will be presented, and all because created no management body assures the president of the managers, who demands the means to tackle the coming problem.
To solve the chaos, Santiago advocates evaluating the administration through external audits that judge what is being done, what is used, how it is used, which groups do it Because, otherwise, it’s like an experiment with the trial and error method, he warns and proposes the creation of a superior council for public administrative processing, that is, a body in which all the interlocutors who work on this matter are present. The officials are represented by the social agents, business organizations that represent the company, and the professional associations that represent citizens in the legal field, which are mainly the administrative managers, lawyers, and social lawyers. This way it is possible to know if a rule works or not.
DILIGENCE
To improve the situation, the specialist also defends the figure of “a professional who helps to prequalify and resolve files. We have detected that the files that come from the hand of an individual become five requests. The professional, on the other hand, takes the papers. , looks at them, prequalifies them and, when they are perfect, sends them. Also, it is committed to the creation of a state agency for administrative management. “With these bases, we could improve by 200% in the management of the crisis.
Santiago has also noted the difficulty in carrying out the process and the slowness in its review of the administrative processes of the minimum vital income (IVM) during the crisis. “It was poorly planned and has failed. It is a window procedure and these were collapsed by the pandemic. Furthermore, digital procedures cannot be directed to a population without resources and many files have gone wrong or have been poorly processed because the requirements were not clear: It was a populist measure that becomes unpopular. Many people have thought that they could have access, but then they have put in place some rules that have not been able or known to be fulfilled. What I would have done is to have contacted the usual social collaborators so that they could process it free of charge, as do the public defender in legal cases or the managers in case of income warns Santiago, who will continue working to get positive resolutions.
I have a genetic misfortune and it is that I do not sleep. At six o’clock in the morning, I am working in the office until one or two in the morning. I think that any meeting that lasts more than 20 minutes is a waste of time. I am obsessive when it comes to work because when I commit I have to abide by it.
