Employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan may be taking millions of dollars worth of unauthorized overtime because nobody there appears to be in charge of monitoring it.
“Confusion” over who is responsible for enforcing overtime rules raised the risk of “fraud and abuse” in USAID’s payment systems, according to the agency’s inspector general.
At USAID’s mission in Afghanistan, for example, officials failed to follow procedures for 98 percent of the overtime hours billed, which cost the agency $16.3 million.
“In our opinion … working more than 90 percent of overtime hours without corresponding premium pay requests indicates abuse,” the inspector general said.
One of the major problems stemmed from the fact that employees could earn overtime pay without providing documentation showing why they needed it. The agency’s online payroll software allowed staff to simply click past a warning message when submitting requests for overtime pay without having to enter any supporting information.
USAID said it was prepared to accept the risks posed by the payroll program’s lax requirements because imposing additional restrictions could “make the system too limiting, eliminating flexibility that may be needed in some circumstances to assure that payroll payments are made to employees timely.”
Reginald Mitchell, USAID’s chief financial officer, and Jay Mahanand, the agency’s chief information officer, pointed to employees who are forced to work 30 hours of overtime each pay period in Afghanistan or others who have “to meet an unexpected but legitimate business need of the agency” as evidence of cases in which written overtime approval could prove burdensome.
Other agencies have struggled to tamp down abusive overtime pay practices. In 2013, several offices in the Department of Homeland Security were caught allowing their employees to pad paychecks with extra hours of overtime, during which staff were often not working.
Go here to read the full USAID inspector general report.
