Tens of thousands of civil servants will switch to a GPS-based attendance application

Tens of thousands of government office workers are expected to say goodbye soon to the attendance cards that they sign upon entering the office every morning, and switch to reporting attendance through a dedicated application, which will be installed on their cell phones. The application will verify the employee’s arrival at the workplace using the phone’s GPS system.

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This is a move led by the General Accounting Division of the Ministry of Finance, in collaboration with the National Digital System. As part of it, a dialogue is currently taking place with the Histadrut. The workers’ organization does not object in principle to the change in the method of reporting attendance, but recently a meeting was held in the office of the chairman of the State Employees’ Union, Ofir Alkalai, in which the heads of committees also participated via Zoom, and some of them were indignant and expressed concerns that the GPS-based application would expose the workers to surveillance by the state.

The Treasury sought to refute the claim. The provider will be required to prove that there is no technical possibility in the application to access the phone’s location outside of the reporting moments themselves, and to incorporate a built-in mechanism that prevents this.

The possibility of appointing an external auditor, in coordination with the Histadrut, is also being considered, to verify once a year that the system complies with the privacy requirements. The location data will be stored on the government network, and not on the servers of the external provider, and in the background the Israel Mapping Center is also included in the move, due to the security sensitivity regarding the identification of the offices and sites where the employees are employed.

Pilot in some offices

The Treasury is currently examining a number of technological solutions from companies operating in the Israeli market. The ministry is already conducting a limited pilot for signing a digital card among some employees of the ministries of finance, housing and health. The goal set by the deputy accountant general responsible for the technology division, Avitar Peretz, who is in charge of the project, is that by January 2027 a ready interface will be received that can be connected to all government ministries.

The transition to reporting attendance in the application is part of a much broader plan, which was launched at the end of 2024 to replace the “next card” – the smart card that civil service employees have had for about two decades. The existing card is used for a variety of uses: entering buildings, connecting to a computer, identification in sensitive information systems such as the Merkava system, reporting attendance, purchasing meals at office cafeterias and identification when entering secure areas.

Each of these uses will be replaced by a mobile phone based digital solution. The lunch voucher has already been replaced by a kind of dedicated credit card, with which the civil servants pay for the food, and the subsidy entitlement is deducted directly from their account. The identification when entering the work computer has already moved from the card to the government’s IDP platform – the central identification system, based on receiving a one-time password for the phone.

Card exchange with identification

Another significant step is planned for another two weeks, on the 10th of May, when access to the governmental Markava system and the systems of the national digital system will be blocked using the physical card, and the identification of the employees will be carried out exclusively through the IDP.

At the same time, pilots are underway to replace employee cards with identification for entering government offices. At the Ministry of Finance, some employees already enter the buildings by attaching the phone to the reader instead of attaching the card. A preliminary pilot of physical identification through a digital certificate has already been successfully completed in other government offices in Jerusalem.

In the background, the Treasury wants to say goodbye to the smart card mainly for reasons of costs and information security. Over the years, uses and technologies have been added to the card, and today several chips are installed in it, the total cost of which reaches about NIS 100 per card – a significant expense multiplied by tens of thousands of civil servants.

The Treasury notes that the cards are a security risk, as they can be transferred to another employee along with the password – which allows connection to sensitive systems in the name of the signed employee. It is estimated that the transition will not require a significant additional budget, but will replace existing operating costs. Employees who do not have a smart phone will receive an alternative solution.

The Histadrut of the State Employees responded: “The Histadrut of the State Employees is in dialogue with the state, and several meetings have even been held on the subject. The Histadrut has no objection in principle to the use of digital means, as long as the privacy of the employees is fully preserved. We will continue to support any solution that will improve the service, provided that the purpose of the move is not to create a surveillance tool or harm the rights of the employees.”