At least one Department of Correction employee was on paid administrative leave for three years, according to a newly released audit of the DOC that found excessive amounts of paid administrative leave at the department over the course of 2022 and 2023 costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Our review of ten employees on paid administrative leave during the audited period disclosed nine remained on leave beyond the limit by approximately 12 months to three years and six months,” the auditors wrote. “We calculated DOC paid these employees $834,955 during the unallowed time.”
According to the union contract for DOC employees, an employee can be placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation for up to two months; any longer than two months requires approval by the Connecticut Department of Labor. The 128 employees reviewed by the auditors racked up more than 100,000 hours of paid administrative leave.
“DOC unnecessarily paid $834,955 in wages to employees who could have been placed on unpaid leave, terminated, or returned to work,” the audit said.
DOC, however, said that part of the reason for the excessive administrative leave time is due to circumstances outside their control. Because the employees were being investigated for use of force, felony arrest for off-duty misconduct, or “undue familiarity” which can involve smuggling contraband into the facility, the DOC must wait until the investigation is concluded before either returning the employee to work or issuing discipline.
“Often investigations and criminal charges are delayed as they involve entities our agency has no control over such as the Inspector General’s Office, the State Police and the Judicial Court System,” the DOC responded. “The agency cannot return employees to work while any charges are pending and investigations are open. To do so would be a direct threat to the safety and security of our institutions.”
The audit also found that ten DOC employees racked up 2,380 hours of union leave time over two years. Union leave time is when an employee – generally a union steward – is granted paid leave to handle union business. Over the course of two years, that amounted to 307 employees taking 65,385 hours of union leave while receiving $2.6 million in pay.
The DOC also lacked adequate documentation for overtime payments and, according to auditors, awarded overtime to employees who were “not normally eligible for overtime.”
Annually, DOC has by far the highest overtime costs in all of state government, being a department that has to function 24/7 with staff. Many employees are mandated to work overtime when there are not enough employees to handle a shift. According to the auditors, over 2022 and 2023, DOC spent $96.6 million and $103.4 million respectively on overtime. It has been an ongoing issue for DOC since 2010, according to the audit.
The department responded that part of the issue is that they must manually enter overtime into the system in accordance with the collective bargaining agreements.
“Logs are manual inputted and maintained in the Atlas program for each calendar date timesheet to assure all employees are hired for overtime appropriately per bargaining agreements,” the department responded. “The agency does agree it should be outlined where the storage of the manual logs should be maintained as there isn’t such a policy in place currently.”
The audit also found that nineteen of the twenty randomly selected employees “did not meet minimum training requirements” for employment, which could affect their responsiveness to “various situations.” The department also lacked proper documentation for hiring and promotions of employees and missing or incomplete annual employee reviews.
The department indicated they would work with the Department of Administrative Services to “strengthen internal controls” and update its directives. The auditors reported on 18 findings within DOC. Fifteen of those findings were repeat findings from other years.
Was this article helpful?
Topics on this page
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Connecticut officials could be doing a variety of things to bring this under control. Most impactful for this narrow issue would be to negotiate more competently with the union to ensure quick termination or other accountability is possible. In Connecticut, there is little political incentive to negotiate from a position of strength and keep public servants in check. The more important element to fix this in the long term is to address the over criminalization of the Connecticut people. In a misguided attempt to pursue “safety” legislators have created entirely new classes of criminals. The legal system needs to be narrow to be effective. A large bureaucracy isn’t sustainable, efficient or effective.
Empty Words…
The department indicated they would work with the Department of Administrative Services to “strengthen internal controls” and update its directives. The auditors reported on 18 findings within DOC. Fifteen of those findings were repeat findings from other years.”
Unless we start firing individuals in management for this these types of lame reponses everytime any state agency’s management staff incompence is revealed bu an audit. Fire, Demote, Penalize…It is the approriate response taxpayers deserve.