Nassau County Comptroller George Maragos released his review of Nassau County’s part-time workforce and found one employee appeared to have had clock-in irregularities, and potential work schedule conflicts with other employment. This employee has now been suspended and the case has been referred to the District Attorney. Forty-two part-time employees, or less than 10% of all part-time staff, exceeded County guidelines by working more than 39.75 hours per bi-weekly pay period. With the exception of one employee, all of the other employees in the review sample were confirmed to have worked the hours claimed with adequate supervision. The Mangano Administration has reduced the number part time employees by 40% and salaries by over $500,000 since 2009.
The Nassau County Human Resources department has now contacted all County departments and advised them to be stricter in the enforcement of maximum work hours for part-timers. Additionally, the Parks Department supervisors have been instructed to enforce the use of the electronic time keeping system to track employee timesheets.
“Although only one employee was found to have possible clock-in irregularities, we have zero tolerance for employees who may attempt to cheat the County,” said Comptroller George Maragos. “We are happy that the level of misuse was limited to only one employee and that the Human Resources Department and the Parks Department have tightened rules and supervision of part-time employees to ensure compliance with County regulations.”
The employee referred to the District Attorney for investigation had a significant number of missed clocks (86 between January 1, 2013 and July 13, 2014) with unusual or no explanations. Our report details the missed clock explanations entered in the InTime system, indicating that, at times, this employee spent up to 11-12 hours per day attending activities that did not pertain to his listed title. Further investigation revealed the employee is also employed by the Town of Hempstead. His regular work hours at the Town are 9:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., with a one hour lunch break. The auditors obtained and examined his timesheets from the Town and compared the days and times worked to his Nassau County InTime records to identify potential overlapping hours. We noted 159 instances between January 1, 2013 and July 13, 2014 where his Town of Hempstead timesheets reflected he had worked a full 8 hour day there and then clocked in at his Nassau County job between 4:46 p.m. and 4:59 p.m., less than 15 minutes later.
The distance between the Town of Hempstead and Eisenhower Park Administration Building, where this employee generally clocked into his part-time Parks job, is more than 4.8 miles. Our report reveals that for 95 of the 159 instances, the employee had less than five minutes to perform the 4.8 mile commute. The ability to commute 4.8 miles and park in five to fifteen minutes at such a busy time of day is highly unlikely and raises the concern that this employee might not be clocking in himself, as well as the possible theft of time.
The full report is available on the Comptroller’s website.