He’d worked long enough in payroll to know how, for instance, to pay himself in advance for vacation time — then again when he got back.
That’s one of many explanations police are probing in an investigation into how a 42-year city employee allegedly siphoned off money for himself since 2003 without getting caught — to the tune of up to $100,000.
The city payroll department employee resigned his job this past Friday after officials told him they were going to begin the process of trying to fire him.
They did that after learning that the payroll employee had allegedly been gradually pocketing money since back in the DeStefano administration. The Harp administration made the discovery during an audit inspired by the revelation last year that a different employee had stolen over $10,000 through misuse of a city credit card.
The administration contacted the police about the most recent discovery. Police have launched an investigation.
The audit found that the payroll employee “knowingly, deliberately, and surreptitiously falsified payroll records and vacation accruals to illicitly acquire a significant amount of money -– to which the employee was not entitled,” the administration announced in a press release late Tuesday afternoon, hours after the news was first reported in the Independent.
Investigators are looking at multiple ways the employee in question — whose title was “management analyst” assigned to payroll — allegedly accessed the money.
One of those numerous ways appears to have been through vacation pay advances, according to one official familiar with the investigation. City policy allows for employees to submit forms to be paid in advance when they go on vacation. Then a payroll employee makes sure that employee does not receive that pay again upon returning.
Unless, allegedly, that payroll employee is handling his own vacation advances.
“It’s almost a prefect scam,” this official said. “He could assign himself payroll advances” and then keep the regular payments coming afterwards.
Last Tuesday officials notified the employee in question — whose title was “management analyst” assigned to payroll — that he would face a pre-termination (aka “Loudermill”) hearing, a required first step for the city to fire someone. That hearing was scheduled to take place this Monday.
But first the employee put in retirement papers on Friday.
The Independent could not reach the employee for comment and is withholding his name pending hearing his side or the entering of a plea to potential criminal charges.
In Tuesday afternoon’s release, Mayor Toni Harp is quoted describing the audit that caught the alleged long-term theft as part of broader fiscal controls her administration has instituted over the past year.
“[I]t’s a major disappointment to learn of these discrepancies, reinforcing my resolve to eradicate any others,” Harp states in the release. “Despite this apparent, isolated manipulation of the system to bypass existing controls, my faith in the integrity of the city’s workforce remains intact.”
Other new procedures include independent IT “proof reports” that internal auditors use to reconcile accounts; and “quarterly reports to ensure no unauthorized, supplemental vendor, payroll, or pension checks are issued,” according to the release.
The litigation and internal witch-hunts are exhausting.