* From the Illinois Auditor General’s report on the Department of Corrections 2022-2024…

Department of Corrections (Department) allowed employees to use leave time (i.e., sick, vacation, personal leave, and accumulated holiday time) for their regular shift and then work another shift at an overtime rate on the same day. While there may be instances where this would be a needed solution to a difficult staff coverage scenario, it could be a sign of abuse of overtime and may be against Department policy.

According to the Department, for Fiscal Year 2024 through June 30, 2024, there was a total of 2,958,142 hours of overtime paid at a cost of $151,734,099. Stateville Correctional Center reported 393,832 hours of overtime at a cost of $21,829,406, the highest amount of overtime of any correctional facility. The facility with the next highest amount of overtime was the Dixon Correctional Center with 210,329 hours of overtime at a cost of $10,977,269. We reviewed overtime payments for 20 employees. We selected 10 employees at the Stateville Correctional Center and 10 employees at the Dixon Correctional Center who had the highest amount of overtime paid. As part of our review, we obtained employee annual timesheets and payroll reports. In our review of these 20 employee timesheets, 16 employees (80%) had used a full day of benefit time at least once during the fiscal year on the same day they had worked an overtime shift. For these 16 employees, we identified a total of 150 instances for the two years ended June 30, 2024, in which employees used a full day of leave time (7.5 hours) the same day that they also worked overtime. The instances per employee ranged from 1 to 30 instances during Fiscal Year 2023 and Fiscal Year 2024.

We requested any union agreements that allow overtime pay on the same day that leave time is taken; however, the Department could not provide any union agreements which did so.

The Department’s Overtime Equalization Training Manual requires the Department to not consider employees on benefit time for Master Overtime Equalization if the overtime is occurring during the time of the employee’s absence. This finding was first noted during the Department’s Fiscal Year 2014 State compliance examination, ten years ago. As such, Department management has been unsuccessful in implementing a corrective action plan to remedy this deficiency. The Department’s management team is responsible for implementing timely corrective action on all of the findings identified during a State compliance examination. […]

DEPARTMENT RESPONSE

o Recommendation implemented.
o The Department follows the policy listed in the finding by not allowing employees to work overtime on the same shift for which benefit time was used, since the overtime would occur during their absence.
o The Department plans to revise the Overtime Equalization Manual to explicitly state the circumstances where the policy applies.

Not great management there.

* The Tribune’s Jeremy Gorner asked the governor about the report at an unrelated news conference…

Gorner: The Illinois Auditor General released a report today showing that Illinois Department corrections, among other things in the audit, were allowed to work overtime on the same day as they were on paid leave, raising concerns by the auditor general that prison employees were abusing overtime. It’s not the first time the Auditor General has raised overtime related issues with agencies under your leadership, what’s your reaction to this new audit, and what’s your administration doing to remedy the problem?

Pritzker: Well, I haven’t seen this audit, let me say that right up front. But let me also point out that, as you know, these audits are a year or two old when they come out. And you may recall that a couple years ago, every industry was having trouble hiring because there was a labor shortage, including all the departments of the state of Illinois. We’ve rectified that to a greater degree. We’ve hired quite a number of people. I think you’ve seen us announce that. But look, number one is we want our correctional officers to be safe. We want to have enough correctional officers at any given moment that are covering the prisons and all their duties. And so I guess it may be that there was overtime- or that there was some observation by the auditor general that too much money went to the correctional officers. But I have to say they do an amazing job, and we don’t want to cross any of the rules of hiring, but we also want to make sure that we’ve got enough people on the job to do the job when we need them.

Needs a better response.

(Isabel Miller contributed to this post.)