Government details public administration modernization plan: Payroll control, civil service reform, and telework

Santo Domingo.- The Ministry of Public Administration (MAP) is advancing in a process of modernization and efficiency of the Dominican State, informed Minister Simón Freud during his participation in the Business 2025 Forums. The official explained that in the last five years the public payroll has grown “organically”, with an increase of between 70,000 and 80,000 employees. He specified that 80% of that growth corresponds to the education, health and security sectors. “For each school that the Government inaugurates, not only teaching staff is required, but also administrative staff. The same happens in health with the opening of new primary care centers and in security with the hiring of more police officers,” he said.

Freud emphasized that, despite the increase, the pace of growth of the payroll is “well below” what happened in previous government periods (2012-2020 and 2004-2012). He indicated that one of the measures adopted by President Luis Abinader has been the strict control of new hires, authorizing only personnel “strictly necessary and sensitive” for priority areas.

Integrated Civil Service System

As part of the institutional transformation, the MAP implemented the Integrated Civil Service System, a platform designed to centralize and unify the data of all personnel in the central public administration and decentralized organizations. Freud lamented that historically no government has had precise data on the actual number of public employees, depending on scattered records from the Treasury of Social Security and the Central Bank.