MANILA -- Secretary Carlos Dominguez III has ordered the Department of Finance (DOF),  its attached agencies and state corporations to prepare their respective plans on transitioning work back to their respective office,   with strict adherence to health and safety protocols, after more than a year of shifting to work-from-home (WFH) arrangements because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Dominguez said that as more government employees  get fully vaccinated, the DOF and its agencies such as the Bureaus of Customs (BOC),  of  Internal Revenue (BIR),  of Local Government Finance (BLGF)  and of the Treasury (BTr);  Insurance Commission (IC), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and other attached organizations  should gradually shift to working normally in their respective offices. 

The transition plans,  Dominguez said, should include testing protocols for employees and their immediate families, and seminars to educate them on how to return safely to full-time office work.

“I think that we should already have a plan for transitioning back into working normally. In other words, back-to-office work,” Dominguez said during a recent executive committee (Execom) meeting for other attached agencies and state-run corporations under the DOF. 

“I'd like everybody to start working on this  plan already assuming that we're going to have to live with this virus,” he added. 

The Interagency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) has yet to allow the full transition to back-to-office arrangements with the National Capital Region (NCR) now  under General Community Quarantine (GCQ) with Alert Level 3 status. 

In the DOF, 76.6 percent of its employees have been fully vaccinated as of October 8. (DOF)