Cebu City Hall | Cebu City PIO/Facebook
CEBU CITY, Philippines — Thousands of temporary workers were hired by the Cebu City government last year to perform duties usually assigned to regular employees.
This occurred despite most of the city’s approved permanent positions remaining vacant and repeated disapprovals from the Civil Service Commission (CSC).
The Commission on Audit’s (COA) 2024 Annual Report revealed that Cebu City’s hiring practices contradicted civil service rules, potentially wasting public funds and undermining the merit-based principles of public employment.
“In no case shall a casual appointment be issued to fill a vacant plantilla position,” COA emphasized. It cites the 2017 Omnibus Rules on Appointments and Other Human Resource Actions (ORAOHRA).
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Instead of hiring regular employees, the city issued 2,818 casual appointments, many of them for licensed professionals like nurses, dentists, and accountants, even as 63 percent of the city’s plantilla positions remained unfilled by the end of 2024.
COA flagged specific examples: the Cebu City Medical Center hired 19 casual nurses despite having 17 Nurse I plantilla positions vacant.
The Cebu City Traffic Office deployed 15 casual workers as utility laborers, while 92 regular posts for the same role remained empty.
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These cases, the audit noted, clearly violated rules barring casuals from performing plantilla functions.
Despite multiple disapprovals from the CSC and the availability of qualified personnel, the city continued the same hiring practice, reissuing contracts, extending appointments, and ignoring corrective action.
Over 5,000 JO workers are doing regular work
Even more troubling, COA found, was the proliferation of Job Order (JO) hires, which were meant only for short-term, emergency, or manual jobs. By year-end, the city had hired 5,224 JO personnel, many of whom were performing day-to-day functions typically assigned to plantilla staff.
Some had been hired continuously for two to five years, in direct contradiction to CSC rules limiting JO contracts to temporary or intermittent tasks.
“This practice potentially compromises the quality and efficiency of public service delivery and runs counter to the principle of merit and fitness in government employment,” COA warned.
Test reviews showed JO workers serving as traffic enforcers or administrative aides, roles intended for regular employees who are subject to screening, training, and competitive hiring processes.
Poor hiring, poor services
Governance experts say this overreliance on temporary hires risks deteriorating public services, particularly in frontline sectors such as health, traffic management, and licensing.
Casual and JO workers, while essential stopgaps, do not receive the benefits, job security, or professional development offered to regular staff. This affects morale, service continuity, and public accountability.
At a time when government hospitals need more nurses and skilled civil servants who are crucial to implementing reforms, the city’s hiring pattern reflects a governance gap that could affect long-term institutional capacity.
COA’s recommendations
COA urged the Cebu City government to:
- Cease using casual and JO workers to fill plantilla functions,
- Fast-track the hiring and regularization of qualified existing personnel,
- Reorganize its staffing pattern to reflect service demands and fiscal capacity, and
- Review all unfunded or unnecessary plantilla items and realign hiring priorities accordingly.
The Human Resource Development Office (HRDO), in its reply, acknowledged ongoing organizational reforms but cited budget limitations, unfunded positions, and salary constraints as barriers to faster regularization.
City left 2,311 plantilla jobs unfilled, P2.19B in funds unused — 2023 audit
The new COA report builds on earlier findings released in 2023, which showed that the Cebu City government had left 2,311 plantilla positions unfilled, translating to P2.192 billion in unutilized appropriations.
That audit, covering data up to December 31, 2023, revealed that out of 3,645 approved plantilla positions, only 1,334 were filled, while thousands of casuals (3,172) and JO workers (3,338) were brought in to carry out government functions.
COA warned that the city’s continued reliance on temporary labor, despite budgeted, approved plantilla positions, suggests weak implementation of staffing reforms and undermines consistent, high-quality public service delivery.
This was despite pronouncements from then-mayor Michael Rama in April 2024, who had declared a “massive regularization” program to follow the city’s employee rightsizing effort, which aimed to cut the workforce from 10,000 to 3,000.
Rama said 600 permanent jobs had been opened for appointment, although the COA noted that over 2,300 regular jobs still needed to be filled.
Non compliance
COA noted that since 2021, Cebu City had not significantly increased the number of permanent employees in government service, even though it had the budget and a legal obligation to do so. Instead, it relied heavily on casuals and JO workers who performed regular duties without tenure or security.
“While some of the plantilla positions remained vacant, the same position titles were held or the same functions were performed by casual employees. This is not in keeping with Section 9(g), Rule VI of the ORAOHRA,” COA had warned in the 2023 audit.
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