No more ghost employees at Valenzuela City Hall

Valenzuela City Mayor Sherwin Gatchalian said yesterday the days of ghost employees at City Hall are over.

The mayor made the announcement as the full use of biometrics, or the use of finger-scanning machines, in checking and monitoring attendance of City Hall workers officially began this month after a three-month test-run that began in September this year.

Gatchalian said the installation of the employee monitoring system was part of his "10-point agenda for development" to transform the city’s employees into world-class civil servants, who are "efficient, effective and highly motivated for public service."

Biometrics, an idea initiated by the Boston University-educated Gatchalian, accurately and effectively replaces the cumbersome and easily manipulated daily time records (DTRs) by employees timing in and out of office.

The old method, for the longest time, was seen as an opportunity to cheat on work time by City Hall personnel.

"The machines will terminate the ’15-30’ employees. No one can punch in or out for anyone anymore like they used to. With the employees putting in as much work as they should, their productivity would have to increase and that would redound to nothing less than better public service," Gatchalian said.

James de Guzman of City Hall’s Information Technology Office said they have five terminals — three at the main building, and one each for the annex and the City Action Center.

An employee swipes his or her City Hall identification card in a slot of the terminal and puts an index finger on top of a sensor. The data on the card and the fingerprint are automatically matched, establishing the employee’s identity.

De Guzman told The STAR that the terminals are automatically connected online to the Human Resources Management Office (HRMO), particularly the Timekeeping and Payroll Sections.

He said it works in such a way that even if it was offline at the HRMO, particularly after office hours, the machine continues to function, storing data for retrieval later when the HRMO comes online again.

"Cheating, particularly the notorious system of punching time records by proxy, is on its way out," said de Guzman, although admitting there are still some stragglers that persist in their old habits.

He said a random or spot checking system has been implemented to check this.