Consultation is proposed with respect to the calculation of the deadlines for taking office as career civil servants in the State Administration on the basis of the provisions of article 114.12 of Royal Decree-Law 6/2023, of 19 December, which approves urgent measures for the implementation of the Plan of Recovery, Transformation and Resilience in the field of public service justice, public service, local regime and patronage.

Article 114.12 of Royal Decree-Law 6/2023, of 19 December, provides that “(...) the entry into office of career civil servants must be made within a period of fifteen calendar days from the date of publication of the appointment, which will be one month when it involves a change of place of residence.”

This provision replaces the provisions of Article 36 of Decree 315/1964, of 7 February, approving the Civil Servants Act of the State, which determined that the inauguration would take place within one month of notification of the appointment.

On the other hand, Article 114.12 of Royal Decree-Law 6/2023 of 19 December states that: “In the case of interim and prospective staff members, the appointment shall take place on the day following the appointment.”

Doubts have arisen regarding the Dies Ad Quo which will be taken into account by the units of staff and newly appointed staff, and whether the new wording involves a change of that initial time of the deadline.

In order to elucidate this issue, in the field of human resources, the distinction must be drawn between substantive deadlines and procedural or procedural deadlines. This distinction is the one established, in the civil sphere, between the periods of limitation, determinants in the enjoyment of rights, and the periods of expiry, strictly linked to the scope of the process.

Thus, substantive deadlines are those that determine the time-frame in which the enjoyment of a right is to be deployed, while procedural or procedural deadlines are those periods of time during which the party or interested party is required to take a specific action in the context of a particular process or procedure.

The substantive deadlines will have to be regulated by the provisions of the special rule, while the procedural deadlines are imbricated in the rules of Law 39/2015, of 1 October, of the Common Administrative Procedure of Public Administrations.

As explained in the Explanatory Statement of the above-mentioned law, “The main novelty is the introduction of the computation of deadlines by hours and the declaration of Saturdays as unworking days, thus unifying the computation of deadlines in the judicial and administrative sphere”that is, unifying the computation of the procedural deadlines that constitute the object of the LPACAP with the procedural ones, but not necessarily with those that have a substantive character.

In the field of human resources, which we are dealing with now, there are both substantive and procedural deadlines, those of a substantive nature being those during which public employees are entitled to the enjoyment of a permit, for example, and those of a procedural nature, those that are set, in this same example, for the request for the enjoyment of the permit by the interested party to be made or for the Administration to respond to that request by express resolution or, failing that, by administrative silence.

In this case we are indubitably faced with a procedural deadline, which are governed by the provisions of Law 39/2015, of 1 October.

Therefore, given the indeterminacy of the wording used in the rule, the legislator’s willingness to proceed with a tacit derogation, or non-application of article 30 of Law 39/2015, of 1 October, of 1 October, of the Common Administrative Procedure of Public Administrations, which establishes the general rules on the counting of deadlines in administrative law, cannot be inferred.

Specifically, article 30.3 of Law 39/2015, of 1 October, states the following:

“3. The periods expressed in days shall be counted from the day following the day on which the notification or publication of the act in question takes place, or from the day following the day on which the estimate or the dismissal takes place by administrative silence.”

Therefore, the Dies Ad Quo It shall, in any case, be on the day following the publication of the resolution on the appointment of the Career Civil Servant staff.

In addition, Article 30 of Law 39/2015, of 1 October, does not authorize the national legislator or the law of the European Union to alter the rules on the calculation of deadlines. However, it does allow the general rule of business days to be modified by the use of calendar days, an issue that Royal Decree-Law 6/2023, of 19 December, has taken advantage of to determine the special rule of calendar days in relation to the deadline for taking office.

A different interpretation would lead to a change in legal status on the same day in certain cases where the appointment involves a prior termination, for example as an interim official or trainee.

All of the above is without prejudice to remember that, according to the regime of competences of this management center, the answers to queries issued by this general directorate are merely informative and, consequently, do not have the character of a binding criterion, nor do they give rise to rights or expectations of law, nor do they imply any link with the type of procedures to which they refer. In addition, since they are not mandatory or binding, the bodies to which such replies are addressed may, where appropriate, finally take a decision that does not correspond to the opinion contained therein.

The answers to queries contained in this bulletin deal with the issues raised in the light of the regulations in force at the time of their issuance, so that these answers may be affected by subsequent legislative changes or judicial resolutions.