BALTIMORE — "Virtually no monitoring."
That's how a legislative audit described the Baltimore Police Department's tracking of overtime between December 2020 and June 2022.
During that period officers worked more than 980,100 overtime hours for a grand total of nearly $58 million.
Just over 41 percent of the time, the work was voluntarily while almost 29 percent 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.
The department often blamed staffing shortages, but the audit appears to tell a different story.
As of September 2023 the police department reported 753 vacancies, up from 204 in 2018.
Yet according to the audit, only about 29 percent of the overtime in fiscal year 2022 was attributable to staffing shortages.
The audit found 100 officers who each recorded more than 1,000 hours of overtime that year.
Of those, seven earned $100,000 on top of their regular annual salary. Auditors say the top 10 earners in the department "routinely violated certain key overtime requirements."
The 58 page report suggests "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 the limit on 693 occasions.
A large chunk of overtime (71 percent) wasn't even approved beforehand, but rather after the work was completed.
Another source of overtime went towards what's called 'internal secondary employment.'
That includes security the department provides for the Maryland Stadium Authority at Baltimore Orioles and Ravens games.
Records of those 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 implementing Workday, an HR/Payroll system that 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.
- Provide additional training and education on responsibilities and payroll policy compliance
- Mandate attendance to monthly training for repeat policy non-compliance offenders identified via audits and command review
- Conduct regular internal audits of overtime activity
- Host quarterly internal meetings to review General Fund budgets inclusive of overtime budgets
- Improve distribution of overtime in a fair and equitable manner that is also compliant with BPD policy
