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Sheriff's Department Violated Rules in Massive Overtime Payouts
Sheriff's Deputies on Horses | Photo by ~db~ via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr
An audit report of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has revealed massive amounts of overtime and disrespect for the rules that may have led to underperforming deputies, according to the LA Times via a county report. Key findings in the report include:
- 348 deputies worked 900 hours of overtime in a year period
- What's lacking are policies and rules regarding overtime, yet even when overtime is used in non-emergency situations, the over-time is not pre-approved.
- On average, the overtime budget exceeded $82.5 million more than planned over the past five years.
- Rules were on long shifts and consecutive days were consistently broken and those supposed to be raising the red flags hardly did.
The report also found that some employees on sick leave were found to be overpaid and a quarter of the 60 bonuses given lacked the proper paperwork.
Department authorities say new jails gave rise for new jobs to be filled and that certain situations like homicides and other unplanned events led to overtime. They do, however, agree rules need to be tightened, especially in a year they are seeing a shrinking budget.
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