If, by chance, you are one of those citizens who finds an official notification in the mailbox, without the postman knocking on your door, you are lucky. It may be annoying to not receive it in hand and have to go to the Post Office. But he has been lucky. A situation that has been widespread for weeks in the South is that this notification is among the more than 16,000 that are piled up in the so-called distribution units, of which there is one for each municipality.
Among them, those of Cho-Parque La Reina (Arona) stand out, where those corresponding to citizens of Arona are accumulated; that of Playa de las Américas, to those of Adeje, and that of San Isidro, to Granadilla. In the first there are 10,000 notifications accumulated and, in the other two, 3,000 in each one.
What does this situation mean? That there are more than 16,000 residents of the region who are not aware that they have been summoned by a court, that the Tax Agency is demanding a certain amount from them, that they must pay a fine or that they face a seizure.
They cannot comply with obligations or exercise rights within the established period because, simply, those deadlines, in many cases, are already passing.
This is demonstrated by the images to which this newspaper has had access of the delivery units of the aforementioned municipalities, in addition to the data provided by the general secretary of the Workers’ Commissions in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Pedro Segura Santos, who reports that “the situation in the South is dramatic but could extend to the entire Canary Islands.” This union is the majority within this public business entity, both in the Islands and at the national level.
“The problem is the lack of hiring,” he explains. We are operating at 80% and, when extraordinary campaigns arrive, such as Christmas, what is done is to hire the personnel that would be necessary under normal conditions, which means that workers are always overloaded with work and have objectives that are impossible to meet. As far as official notifications are concerned, we have gone from forty or fifty a day per postman to more than a hundred. “Who can deliver a hundred notifications every day?” she asks.
Regarding the most affected areas: in Arona, Los Cristianos and Costa del Silencio. In Adeje, Playa de las Américas and Casco. And, in Granadilla, San Isidro and El Médano.
