Employee abuse of a Department of Homeland Security overtime system cost taxpayers more than $500 million in 2013, and is on track to do the same this year.
The system puts employees on a kind of honor system that allows them to choose working extended hours without a supervisor’s prior justification. It was intended to compensate workers only for situations where halting work would be harmful, such as when investigators are tailing suspects.
Instead, employees such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement cooks were allowed to use the system, according to the Government Accountability Office. Others “cleaned up paperwork.”
“Investigations also found that supervisors knowingly authorized … work that was ineligible for compensation,” the GAO said. As a result, abusing overtime “became part of the department’s culture.”
There has been overtime abuse among DHS employees generally since at least 2007, but GAO said Border Patrol agents have been the most frequent offenders and done so since 1996.
Officials in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency accounted for more than three-quarters of DHS’s overtime expenditures, or $394 million, in 2013. From 2008 to 2013, such overtime pay increased for DHS employees from $307 million to $512 million. During this time, there was an increase in both salaries and the number of employees earning self-justified overtime.
Customs alone increased its overtime pay by 75 percent during this time. In 2008, Customs began developing oversight for the system, but that effort stopped the next year while legislative action was considered.
However, the reform was never officially proposed to Congress and didn’t resume policy development until after misuse allegations in 2011, according to the GAO, and has yet to be implemented.
A bill that passed Congress last week, now awaiting the president’s signature, was intended to eliminate overtime abuse by Border Patrol agents.
The bill does not affect $105 million of DHS’s overtime abuse costs that occurred in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in 2013. Overtime abuse increased in that agency by 40 percent between 2008 and 2013.
Some oversight procedures were put in place by DHS in 2013 and 2014, including suspending the overtime program for 700 employees in January, including 565 from Customs and Border Protection.
Another 181 were ICE employees, half of which were already ineligible for uncontrollable overtime, GAO said.
Customs claimed that DHS’s sanctions would hurt new employee recruitment due to less competitive pay. Other agencies reported decreased morale and an increased workload.
For example, Citizenship and Immigration Services saw its backlog of open investigations increase by about 30 percent, though its number of new cases decreased by about 40 percent.
Additionally, DHS had no way of monitoring its new oversight policies, the report said. In order to force accountability, the GAO recommended that the department report their statistics to Congress annually.
Through overtime abuse, employees can make between 10 to 25 percent of their base pay. An employee gets a greater percentage with higher average weekly hours.
Moreover, once an employee’s overtime pay is increased, it will not decrease unless a supervisor manually reverts the percentage. However, supervisors wouldn’t correct their subordinates’ pay, intentionally or not.
