A letter from DOC Commissioner Angel Quiros to Republican Senate Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield, and Sen.
John Kissel, R-Enfield, says that $1,000 will be taken out of each officer’s paycheck for the next five years as a way to repay the State of Connecticut for the extra $160,000 she got because of a payroll mistake.
An audit released recently found that the cop had been given a one-time holiday payment of $3,032, but she kept getting that payment in her bi-weekly paychecks for 54 payments, for a total of $163,729.
After the audit, Harding and Kissel wrote to Quiros to ask about the overpayment and how the agency planned to get that money back.
According to the letter from Quiros, the employee has already paid back $42,167.
This includes a $10,000 check for the initial payment, $4,167 in vacation time, and $1,000 deductions from her paychecks until May 2029 as part of a repayment agreement made in August 2023. Not a single payment has been late yet.
Quiros said that the overpayment was because of the heavy and complicated payroll duties in DOC and the high turnover rate in the payroll unit. He called the job of payroll worker “tedious and stressful.”
Quiros wrote, “The DOC has one of the most complicated payrolls in state government, if not the most complicated.”
“State and federal laws, along with a bunch of complicated Collective Bargaining Agreements that cover the many Bargaining Units that work for the agency, govern how much DOC employees are paid.”
According to Quiros, “DOC, like all state agencies, has had a lot of staff turnover over the past few years. Historically, Payroll Units had a higher than average turnover rate than other Fiscal Units.
This is because the Payroll Clerk position is an entry-level position in state services and the work is boring and stressful.”
“The learning curve is long and steep, and it is a shame that many Payroll Clerks leave their jobs within two years to take advantage of other promotion opportunities in state services.”
In its answer to the audit, DOC said that a staff member made a mistake when coding holiday pay and that a monthly report was accidentally taken away when a payroll manager retired.
The state inspectors found a lot of things in their report, which covered fiscal years 2020 and 2021.
The overpayment problem was just one of them. The auditors found that there was not enough paperwork for overtime, medical leave, and leave in lieu of accrual.
The amount of union leave time where workers kept getting paid while doing union business added up to over $2.2 million, with one person getting 3,728 hours of pay, which the auditors said “appears excessive.”
The Office of Fiscal Analysis says that DOC, which has a budget of $695 million for 2024, is one of the biggest state agencies.
It also has the highest extra costs in the state government, with $107.3 million spent on overtime in fiscal year 2024, which is more than any other state agency.
But DOC was not the first or only agency to make a big mistake with a payoff.
In 2018, it came out that the University of Connecticut had kept paying a professor even after his wife killed him. In the end, she admitted to murder and paid back more than $50,000 to the university.
In his letter, Quiros said, “overpayments can happen for many reasons.”
He also said that because of collective bargaining agreements, coming to an agreement on how to return the money “takes time” and needs the help of the Office of Labour Relations and the Department of Administrative Services.
It is clear that a deal needs to be “negotiated and executed before repayment can begin.”
“The agency does everything it can to get any overpayments paid back,” Quiros wrote.
“If the department can not get a repayment, either because the employee refused to pay or because they quit before repayment could be negotiated or made, the agency sends the case to the Collection Unit of the Department of Administrative Services.
This unit uses all legal tools and methods available to them to get all the money that is owed to the state.”