That Justice Minister Egbert Doran reached a settlement agreement with 24 police officers over their date of employment (see related story) is obviously good news. They had been hired in 2011, but the decrees they received years later confirming their appointments were retroactive only to 2016.
This in turn had negative consequences for their legal position and related benefits, so they went to court. The judge instructed government to take a new, correct decision on May 8, 2017, but apparently that wasn’t done until recently.
While the current minister deserves credit for finally seeing this matter through, the question remains why it had to take that long. It seems government has a habit of neglecting, ignoring and/or not fully complying with judicial rulings that has proven quite costly in terms of both time and money.
What’s more, this matter probably should never have gone to court in the first place. One could understand there might be some confusion over when one or two officers officially joined the force; however, two dozen? And decrees effective not one, two, three or four, but five years after the fact and issued even later?
It’s just one example of the waste, inefficiency and in certain cases downright dereliction of duty that still goes on too often within the public administration. So, although the document now signed is surely a step in the right direction, improving the way government operates is still very much a work in progress.
