Illinois Department of Corrections employees were allowed to work overtime on the same days they were on paid leave, raising concerns by the state’s chief auditor that prison employees were abusing overtime, according to an audit released Tuesday.
The report from Auditor General Frank Mautino’s office, covering a two-year period through June 30, 2024, noted the corrections agency was called out by the state for this same issue a decade earlier and “management has been unsuccessful in implementing a corrective action plan to remedy this deficiency.”
This marks at least the second time within a year that Mautino’s office has flagged a state agency under Gov. JB Pritzker’s purview for problems related to excessive overtime. In December, Mautino’s office disclosed eye-opening overtime issues from a previous two-year period among Illinois Department of Human Services employees as the agency saw an increase in misconduct allegations.
Pritzker on Tuesday said he hadn’t seen the new audit but sought to downplay its significance by noting state audits “are a year or two old when they come out” and then pivoted away from the findings to say “every industry” was having difficulty hiring, including state of Illinois departments.
“We’ve rectified that to a greater degree. We’ve hired quite a number of people. I think you’ve seen us announce that,” Pritzker said following an unrelated event in Joliet. “But, look, number one is we want our correctional officers to be safe. We want to have enough correctional officers at any given moment that are covering the prisons and all of their duties.”
“We don’t want to cross any of the rules of hiring but we also want to make sure that we’ve got enough people on the job to do the job when we need them,” he said.
According to the audit, Mautino’s office reviewed timesheets and payroll reports for 10 employees each from the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill and Dixon Correctional Center in Dixon and found 16 out of the 20 employees during fiscal year 2024 used a full day of benefit time at least once on the same day they worked an overtime shift. During the two-year period ending June 30, 2024, Mautino’s office identified 150 instances in which the 16 workers used a full day of leave time, which is 7 1/2 hours, on the same day they also listed having worked overtime.
The audit didn’t show how much money was paid out in overtime to the 20 employees. But the report revealed that more than 2.9 million hours of overtime were paid to IDOC employees at a cost exceeding $151.7 million for fiscal year 2024, with Stateville reporting the highest amount of overtime of any state prison at just over $21.9 million. Dixon reported the second-largest with close to $11 million in overtime.
“While there may be instances where this would be a needed solution to a difficult staff coverage scenario, it could be a sign of abuse of overtime and may be against Department policy,” Mautino’s office wrote.
The audit covers part of the period during which the Pritzker administration announced it would shutter Stateville and the Logan Correctional Center, a women’s prison near Lincoln, with plans to possibly rebuild the two prisons on the Stateville site. So far, Logan is still operating while people incarcerated at Stateville have largely been transferred to other facilities.
Mautino’s office said IDOC indicated employees take paid leave and work overtime on the same day due to staff shortages and “competing priorities for employees’ time.”
But the audit noted a financial advantage for employees who engage in this practice, as they are paid for the leave time shift at the usual rate for that day and also receive time-and-a-half for the overtime shift on the same day. As for the state, not only would it pay the employee the overtime rate for that shift as well as the regular rate for the paid leave, the state may need to pay another employee overtime to cover the shift for which the leave time was used.
“This type of abuse of leave time may be an example of ‘shift swapping’ in which employees knowingly use leave time and swap shifts in order to gain a financial advantage,” Mautino’s office said.
His office recommended IDOC monitor the use of leave time being used on the same day as overtime being worked “and comply with its training manual by not allowing employees to work overtime on the same day that a full day of leave time is also used.”
An IDOC spokesperson on Tuesday did not respond to an inquiry about the audit from the Tribune. But the agency said in the audit that it implemented the recommendation from Mautino’s office and that it plans to review its “overtime equalization manual” to “explicitly state the circumstances where the policy applies.”
IDOC also emphasized in its response to auditors that the collective bargaining agreement with the union representing most IDOC workers states the department “shall exhaust all efforts to seek volunteers to work the overtime” before requiring an employee to work extra hours, including providing sign-up opportunities. If IDOC doesn’t offer overtime for workers on any volunteer lists, if those extra hours would be for a shift in which those employees did not use their paid time off, that would be a violation of their union agreement, the agency said in the audit, and would be more costly for the state.
But Mautino’s office said that since 2014, IDOC had accepted the recommendation to “comply with its training manual by not allowing employees to work overtime on the same day that a full day of leave time is also used” and it issued a directive in 2016 that “employees who utilize a full shift of pre-approved benefit time off on their regularly assigned shift shall not be eligible for an overtime offering for (n)either the preceding shift nor the following shift.”
Mautino’s office also noted deficiencies by IDOC in other areas, including that it failed to notify “appropriate parties” of where people incarcerated reside once they’re on parole or mandatory supervised release, particularly those who move into facilities regulated by the state’s Departments of Public Health, Healthcare and Family Services or Human Services.