The Catalan minister of the presidency, Laura Vilagrà, announced this Thursday that the fiasco of the public service entry examinations held last weekend will force 13,581 people to repeat each and every one of the tests that were to have been taken, because none of them could be saved in the end. Vilagrà explained that challenges to the legitimacy of the exam results from last Saturday are predictable, and to avoid them, the ministry will now attempt to hold all of the examinations again using the Generalitat's own resources, at the same time as it terminates the outsourcing contract it had signed with the company Cegos.
To this end, the ministry will make a call for civil service officials to supervise the exams, which will be held on July 1st (for rural agents, penitentiary officers and transversal tests) and July 8th (civil servants). These volunteers will do the work that was, until now, entrusted to the subcontracted firm, whose contract the Catalan government has decided to terminate following the organizational debacle that occurred last weekend. Vilagrà assured that these new exams "will be carried out with all the guarantees".
Compensation
The Catalan government also agreed to compensate the 13,500 applicants for the inconvenience caused to them, although Vilagrà did not specify the amount of money they will receive. In any case, this compensation will be generalized, and applicants will not need to claim it individually.
Vilagrà did not give any data on the cost that the fiasco could represent for the government coffers, and indicated that they are still analyzing it. What she did explain is that 3,069 people have reported "very serious or serious" incidents, and that according to his calculations Absolutely 100% of the so-called oposicions - the public service exams - were affected in at least one of the classrooms. A total of 72 different tests were given on Saturday, and 99.7% of the 1,825 civil service places available were affected. This has meant that, to guarantee the procedure, "all of last Saturday's exams have been cancelled".
The problems occurred in a generalized way even though the exams were held on a decentralized basis: 9,147 people sat exams in Barcelona; 1,246, in Girona; 1,634, in Lleida, and 1,554, in Tarragona. As a result of the controversy, the government dismissed the general director of the civil service, Marta Martorell, and on Tuesday appointed her replacement, Anna Maria Molina Cerrat. Several opposition parties, including Junts, are asking that the minister Vilagrà also accept responsibility for the chaos.