After days of finger-pointing between the Denver auditor and the city attorney, a solution to stopping overpayments to departing city workers finally emerged.
A transition from paying employees twice monthly to a bi-weekly and lag payroll system at the beginning of next year is expected to clear up many of the errors contributing to Denver taxpayers shelling out $1 million in overpayments in the past 13 years.
The new system, City Council President Rosemary Rodriguez pointed out on Thursday, will prevent workers from being paid in advance and will allow them and their supervisors to more easily catch time-sheet errors.
“The problem now is that the payroll system pays for work anticipated,” Rodriguez said. “If a person unexpectedly takes a sick day that week, then it isn’t in the system. And fixing the error in the system is difficult to do.”
As far as assigning blame in what most people are characterizing as a “systemic” problem that has lasted 13 years, Rodriguez said: “Everyone is at fault.”
Human error in some city departments, along with employees using paper leave slips that can easily be lost, has caused problems. The payroll system has exacerbated it, as has the lack of any solid policies for heading off problems in verifying unused vacation and sick time before workers leave the payroll. Additionally, the separation audits now relied on for catching mistakes can take weeks and months, making it difficult to find former employees who were overpaid.
Total personnel costs for fiscal year 2006 are $530 million, according to the city budget. Yearly overpayments averaging $80,708, according to the auditor, are about 0.015 percent of annual personnel costs.
The new system won’t fix everything, said auditor spokesman Denis Berckefeldt, but it will go a long way toward improving the situation.
“A lot of problems will go away,” Berckefeldt said.
He also noted that electronic time sheets would take care of many payroll issues as well.
“But the system requires an upgrade to get there,” he said. “And the training component is still not there with the payroll technicians.”
Auditor Dennis Gallagher earlier this week sent a letter to the City Council that criticized the administration for not keeping appropriate tabs on employee leave.
That set off a round finger-pointing over who’s to blame.
Mayor John Hickenlooper’s administration on Thursday said it “would be ridiculous to blame either the mayor or the auditor for creating” the inadvertent overpayment problem, since it dates back more than a decade.
“Both, however, play a role in the solution,” said spokeswoman Lindy Eichenbaum Lent.
Staff writer Karen Crummy can be reached at 303-820-1594 or kcrummy@denverpost.com.
