Contacting and resolving formalities with public administrations has become quite complicated after the pandemic and, in some cases, has become an impossible mission: you cannot go there without an appointment, but when you try to ask for one, on one out of three occasions it is not achieved or, if it is achieved, it requires a wait of more than two weeks or travel to another different city. This is what emerges from the report presented yesterday by the Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU) after launching more than 1,800 appointment requests for the six most common administrative procedures from 25 cities of different sizes and in two periods different seasons: July and October.
“One out of three attempts have failed: either there were no appointments available or they were given for another city [sometimes 200 kilometers from home], and if an appointment was obtained, the delay could be very long, with more of 40 days on average” in certain procedures, summarize the authors of the experiment.
And after fighting with different bodies for tasks as common as applying for a retirement pension, processing unemployment benefits, a life trust, changing the name of the owner of a vehicle, renewing the DNI or obtaining the certificate of previous records for sexual crimes, the conclusion of the members of the OCU is that the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) and civil records are the departments where it requires more patience to be attended to in person.
Some of these procedures can be done online, but this requires knowing how to obtain or use the digital certificate, the electronic DNI or registration in the Cl@ve system. “Increasingly, there are first-class citizens who do everything without problem from home and second-class citizens lost in the tortuousness of the offices” of the Administration, because the accelerated digitization that the pandemic involved “is leaving behind the who do not know how to develop with digital certificates or electronic records”, complain from the OCU. And they detail that those who need face-to-face care and go to the offices of the Public Administration “stumble upon another problem: the telecommuting of civil servants, which makes them less available to attend in person”.
They emphasize that the prior appointment, which was supposed to be an advantage to avoid queues and better organize this face-to-face care for citizens, becomes a barrier when it is difficult to obtain it. In addition, it involves a long wait, since in one out of five attempts by OCU members the deadline for care by prior appointment exceeded two weeks.
“The longest waits are to renew the DNI, in which the average period is 11 days, but in A Coruña, for example, it reaches 32 days”, says the report. To apply for life insurance, the delay is about ten days, with exceptional cases such as Sória or Bilbao, where the average term exceeded 40 days.
This is why the OCU is calling on the administrations to make regulatory changes to guarantee in their service letters that a prior appointment can be obtained in at least 95% of cases and within a maximum period of five working days.
Added to this is the request that information campaigns be carried out and personalized help be offered to citizens to facilitate and extend digital identification, and that appointment quotas be reserved for the most vulnerable citizens or who may have more difficulty completing the procedures in through the internet
