The Connecticut Office of the Attorney General allowed a former employee to keep half of a $22,000 overpayment cited by state auditors after the former employee refused to pay back the full amount, according to a loss report provided to the Comptroller’s Office.
According to the audit of fiscal years 2022 and 2023, the auditors found that officials at the AG’s Office had mistakenly “overpaid one employee $22,096 for accrued sick leave upon their retirement,” indicating the employee had been paid for their full bank of accumulated sick leave rather than just one quarter as outlined in state statute. The overpayment finding was reported by several news outlets when the audit was released in 2025.
The audit indicated that this was due, in part, to Human Resources staffing issues at the AG’s office. According to the response to state auditors by the AG’s Office, they had been “making every effort to recoup the overpayment from the retiree,” and “the retiree agrees with and is aware of the overpayment, and we are working with her to set up a schedule for her to reimburse the State in installation payments.”
The plan, however, appears to have hit a snag, according to the agency’s September loss report, which indicated that although the HR department had contacted the former employee, she refused to cooperate with repayment and would only agree to return half of the funds.
The report also indicates that there was a miscommunication and misunderstanding between the AG’s Office and the auditors which caused the AG’s Office to initially believe a 50 percent repayment was “an acceptable resolution.”
“Upon learning of the misunderstanding, we researched the issue and determined we would not prevail in bringing an action against the former employee, and any cost to attempt to do so would outweigh any recovery,” the AG’s Office wrote.
The overpayment was part of $2.7 million in accumulated sick time paid out to retiring employees over fiscal years 2022 and 2023. However, while this employee may have been allowed to keep part of the overpayment, others have had to pay back large sums as part of settlement agreements with the state.
Auditors over the past two years have found mistaken overpayments at various state departments, including the Department of Children and Families, which issued $1.2 million in overpayments to providers, of which more than $800,000 has been returned; the Department of Economic and Community Development, which issued overpayments to third party lenders and also failed to recover those payments; and the Department of Correction, where one employee collected $163,000 in overpayment due to a payroll mistake.
That DOC employee, who received an additional $3,000 per paycheck in holiday time, repaid more than $42,000 and was subsequently required to deduct $1,000 from her paycheck for the next five years.
Infamously, UConn continued to pay a professor his salary long after he was dead, with his wife, who had murdered him, collecting the payment. She was forced to return $50,000 to the university.
As part of that same September loss report, DCF officials again reported they had continued paying a foster care guardian two years after the child was no longer in their custody, amounting to over $18,000, part of a total of $30,000 in overpayments reported by the department.
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