The Department of Public Health and Social Services owes $421,000 in pandemic overtime as was discussed during a Committee on Health meeting last Friday.
So far, the overtime paid amounts to 1.8 million dollars, which was paid with grants from the American Rescue Plan. Joaquin Blas, Program Director for Public Health’s Division of General Administration said they exhausted these funds by the end of last year.
However, Public Health still owes employees for overtime worked as far back as August 15 of 2020.
Public Health provided a broken down list of how much of that total amount pertains to each year.
$28,280 are owed for overtime worked from August 15, 2020 to August 28, 2021;
$72,102 are owed for overtime from January 1, 2022 to September 24, 2022; and
$320,724 are owed for overtime from October 1, 2022 to January 14, 2023.
According to Blas, some Bureaus are not sending out their timesheets on time, so this also adds to the issue.
“We received one Bureau that submitted their overtime pay for six pay periods from last year, so, we’re getting them piecemeal. So, as soon as we get them it’s a lengthy process on our part to audit them because we have to go through each individual time sheet to ensure that it’s accurate,” he said
Blas added that they were able to identify funding across different accounts and now they are working with the Bureau of Budget and Management Research to accommodate that funding to one account to make it easier to track the payments that are sent out.
Blas said, “we have identified local funding within our budget and we went and scrubbed the accounts and we said okay, we are able to accommodate this.”
“We estimate that once we start moving the funds out within the next two to three weeks, the remaining 421,000 should be paid out,” he added.
