The Connecticut State Police Union has reportedly filed a grievance against the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection (DESPP) after a mistake in payroll processing eliminated roughly $1.3 million in state trooper overtime pay and sent the Comptroller’s Office scrambling to tabulate overtime by hand and issue physical checks.
“During the closing days of the fiscal year last month there were systems issues with the payroll process in the Office of the State Comptroller that caused overtime to be inadvertently eliminated,” Rick Green, director of communications for the DESPP Office of the Commissioner, wrote in a statement. “The Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection and the Comptroller’s office worked to rectify the problem, which required manual entry of overtime hours for Connecticut State Troopers. This delayed overtime checks for troopers until July 2, when checks were delivered to the troopers.”
Typically, state troopers would have received their salary pay plus their overtime in their paychecks on Friday, June 27, which are usually deposited directly into their accounts. The payroll error, however, pushed receipt of the overtime pay until just before the holiday and into the new fiscal year. Only state troopers were affected by the mistake; no other DESPP employees or other state agencies were affected.
The missing overtime pay was issued via physical checks and hand-delivered by DESPP staff following a marathon session in the comptroller’s office trying to rectify the issue, which included staff working at night and on the weekend.
The error was due to an invalid date regarding the fiscal year and “overtime configuration,” according to Comptroller Sean Scanlon, who said he immediately called Colonel Daniel Loughman, commanding officer of the CT State Police, and the CT State Police Union upon discovery of the mistake.
“We discovered that error too late in that payroll cycle to change before the payments went out without the overtime and other types of earnings that were connected to that fiscal year configuration,” Scanlon said in an interview. “We immediately notified the state police and the state police union, and I asked our team to get creative.”
Scanlon says he pooled together “dozens” of OSC employees and worked with state trooper command and the union to “process over 800 individualized special checks that had to be hand calculated for each of these troopers of what their overtime was supposed to be.”
Scanlon says they were able to get the overtime checks done with a delay of only one business day, and while the simplest solution may have been to tack the overtime onto the next pay cycle, he said he wanted to get the trooper paid as quickly as possible.
“I refused to do that because I know how hard these guys work, and I know how important the overtime piece is to them,” Scanlon said.
The Connecticut State Police Union (CSPU) has reportedly filed a grievance over the delay. CSPU Executive Director Andrew Matthews, says the union “has a long-standing practice of not publicly commenting or discussing pending litigation or investigations,” and will release a statement after the matter is adjudicated.
The DESPP is typically one of the largest sources of overtime pay in state government, as troopers work massive amounts of overtime to make up for understaffing. DESPP accounted for $43.7 million in overtime pay in 2024 and is on track to exceed that figure this year, as a third-quarter report by the Office of Fiscal Analysis showed fiscal year 2025 exceeding previous year numbers, although the final tally has yet to be released.
Connecticut has roughly 900 troopers, although previous studies and a state mandate determined the state needs north of 1,200. In 2023, the General Assembly approved a new state police contract worth $70 million that included three years of 2.5 percent pay increases, a $3,500 bonus, and a wage reopener in the fourth year that tacked on an additional 2.5 percent. Discussion of the contract centered on recruiting more state troopers.
Regardless of the pending grievance, Scanlon says he is proud of what his team was able to do, working at night and on the weekend to get the checks processed.
“You obviously never want to have an error like that, we don’t have them very often, but when we do, we step up, we fix the problem and I’m proud of what our team was able to do in difficult circumstances,” Scanlon said.
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