Posted on 01/23/24
| News Source: WMAR2NEWS
"Virtually no monitoring."
That's how a legislative audit described the Baltimore Police Department's tracking of overtime payments between December 2020 and June 2022.
During that time period, the department paid out nearly $58 million for more than 980,100 overtime hours. Just over 41 percent of the time, officers worked the hours voluntarily while almost 29 percent of the time in was involuntary.
"Supervisory personnel at all levels, including front-line supervisors, command, and administrative management, did not exercise the necessary oversight and disciplinary action to effectively monitor overtime and ensure compliance with BPD’s policies and procedures," the audit states.
Often times staffing shortages were blamed for massive amounts of departmental overtime, but the audit appears to tell a different story.
As of September 2023 the police department reported 753 vacancies, up from 204 in 2018. However, according to the audit, only about 29 percent of overtime paid out during fiscal year 2022 was attributable to staffing shortages.
During that time alone, the audit found 100 officers who each recorded more than 1,000 hours of overtime. Of those, seven earned $100,000 in addition to their regular annual salary. Auditors say the top 10 earners in the department "routinely violated certain key overtime requirements."
The 58 page report suggests part of the reason could be "that BPD did not conduct required reviews to ensure that officers did not work more than 32 hours of voluntary overtime per week as required by its policy."
Auditors discovered 268 individuals who exceeded that limit 693 times in fiscal year 2022.
A large chunk of overtime (71 percent), the review found, wasn't even approved beforehand but rather after the work was completed.
Another source of overtime went towards what is considered 'internal secondary employment.'
That includes security services the department provides for the Maryland Stadium Authority at Baltimore Orioles and Ravens games.
Records of these overtime payments were not well maintained, according to auditors.
"BPD could not provide a current agreement with the Maryland Stadium Authority to provide security at Baltimore Orioles and Baltimore Ravens home games, and according to overtime records where such secondary employment was specified, officers received approximately $748,000 and worked approximately 11,600 hours in fiscal year 2022," they wrote.
On Monday the police department issued a detailed response to the audit.
They claim to still be working on implementing a new HR/Payroll system called Workday, which rolled out in December 2020.
"The payroll system in use prior to the current system of record had multiple inherent weaknesses that allowed for employee abuse of time entry, leave tracking and overtime documentation," the department said. "Because of the audit beginning during this time period, we do not believe the report itself reflects a full picture of the circumstances (including the COVID-19 pandemic) that led to the results in the findings nor the present state of our payroll system. During the time period reflected in this audit, we faced multiple challenges that directly affected our overtime outcomes, including weaknesses in the existing payroll system, the implementation of Workday and staffing shortages."
The department listed changes below they plan to implement.