Reprinted from Illinois Leaks with permission:

Algonquin Township Road District Time Card Tuesday #14

BY KIRK ALLEN ON MAY 7, 2019 • ( LEAVE A COMMENT )

McHenry Co. (ECWd) –

If you are new to our Time Card Tuesday series we urge you to catch up by first reading part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13. As pointed out in our last article, it is abundantly clear, whoever was managing payroll has some explaining to do.

This series brings us into the fourth payroll period for 2015 and as suspected, the time cards are plagued with what appears to be extra overtime not worked and regular time padded, both of which garnered significant extra pay. Date of this coverage is for 2/12/2015 to 2/25/2015.

This payroll period is mysteriously missing a couple of time cards so we can only analyze five working days during this period. 

You would think with only five days applicable to the payroll comparison there would be nothing to see, but sure enough, math becomes a problem for whoever is putting these time cards together.

We find once again, vacation time showing up on time cards but not on the Payroll record and being taken during a restricted time frame under the Employee Policy Manual.

This has proven to be a consistent pattern with Ms. Miller’s time cards.  This pay period she records 4 hours of vacation time but as you can see from the payroll record, there was no vacation time paid out

Considering we have missing time cards we have no way of knowing if the vacation was lumped into the Regular pay as has been done in the pas

By recording vacation time as regular time it leaves the door open for it to be used again unless there is some other method being used for tracking vacation, which to date we have not found for 2015.

Even more interesting is the fact a day with only 4.5 hours worked, 2/23/2015, there is an entry for 1 hour of overtime. 

How does one get an hour of overtime when the time card only shows 4.5 hours? 

That nets an extra $45.00

On February 13th, 2015, the time card reflects a start time, no lunch, and no stop time

How does one get paid for 8 hours of work when there is no record of when she stopped work? 

Most auditors would look at that and insist on documentation supporting the hours worked. 

This appears to be 8 hours of regular pay, $240.00, with no record of when the person stopped work.

The payroll record reflects $371.25 in Overtime pay (8.25 hrs) however the regular pay only shows 74 hrs. 

According to the policy manual overtime is only paid when there are 40 hours worked. 

Considering there are missing time cards there is no way to pin down which week had 40 hours of work so we could determine if the overtime was valid.

Of the five days on the time cards for this period we can review, we find it odd that the regular hours on three of them show as 9 hours instead of 8.

February 24, 2015, the total hours worked according to the time card is 9 hrs regular time and 1 hour overtime for a total of 10 hours. 

However, the actual math points to only 9 hrs and 25 minutes worked.

At a minimum, using regular pay figures, this nets an extra 35 minutes of pay at $30.00 an hour, or $17.40

February 25th, 2015 the total hours worked according to the time card is 9 hrs regular time and 1.5 hours overtime for a total of 10.5 hours. 

However once again, the actual math points to only 9 hrs and 35 minutes worked.

Using the same regular pay figures as above, this nets an extra 55 minutes of pay at $30.00 an hour, or $27.60

The following appear to be overpayments as outlined above.

• $240.00 in regular pay even though no stop time on time card -2/13/2015
• $45.00 in overtime while only working 4.5 hours of regular time – 2/23/2015
• $17.40 in extra pay due to bad math
• $27.60 in extra pay due to bad math.

The total for these 4 days appears to point to an extra $330.00 in pay.

With $330.00 extra during only these 4 days, the running total of extra pay now appears to be $22,887.61.

As we have said multiple times, the McHenry County State’s Attorney had these very time cards but we do not know if he ever evaluated them for the type of discrepancies we are seeing against the actual payroll record

This matter is currently in the hands of the Appellate Prosecutor and we are awaiting an update on the status.

While we work towards wrapping up this series we ran a total for the overtime paid to Anna May Miller for 2015, which was 264.81 hours, for a total of $11,916.45. 

It will be interesting to see what the actual math works out to be for that same year.

Stay tuned for next week’s Time Card Tuesday series.

You can download the time cards at this link or view below as well as the payroll record at this link.