Employees at one local authority were earning up to €33,000 in overtime with significant shortcomings in how the extra work was being accounted for.
An internal audit looked at 550 overtime transactions and found that 20 per cent of them, worth €23,083, did not indicate the start or end time of hours worked and could not be verified correctly.
For another 66 claims – valued at €12,362 – the timesheet gave no explanation of what the overtime was even being claimed for at Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council.
Another 25 transactions, together worth €3,741, did not include the hours being claimed for and therefore could not be tested for accuracy by auditors.
Across an eighteen-month period, 232 waged employees were paid a total of €1.247 million in overtime with the top ten payments ranging from €17,650 to €27,359.
A further 62 salaried employees of the council were paid a combined €449,322 in overtime during the same period.
The top ten highest payments in that category of worker ranged in size from €14,518 to €33,334 with some people earning up to 64% on top of their “basic annual pay ranges”.
The audit also found that in some cases, employees were signing off on their own overtime sheets.
An analysis of 550 transactions found 61 cases – worth a combined €10,795 – where the claimant themselves had signed off on the timesheet.
For another fifty of the claims examined, the timesheets did not have “appropriate approval”, meaning they had not been signed off by a supervisor or foreman as required.
25 of the overtime claims did not have any sign-off at all, but the €4,885 claimed on them was still paid out by the council.
These findings were considered “high priority” by the auditors Mazars with a further six medium priority findings also made by the firm.
In other findings, auditors said more than forty per cent of transactions analysed did not follow the format officially required for payment.
This included the submission of timesheets in computer formats where they could be edited as well as difficulties in assessing whether overtime was approved in accordance with procedures.
In another finding, 56 of 550 transactions were found to have had the overtime rate calculated incorrectly, resulting in both overclaims and underclaims.
Mazars also found that entries in the council’s Coretime HR system were being approved or signed off by staff that were not listed as “authorised users” of the system.
In conclusion, the report said only “limited assurance” could be provided on the controls in place at the council for managing overtime processes.
It said: “There is an inadequate and/or ineffective system of governance, risk management and internal control in place and there is a significant risk that the system will fail to meet its objectives.”
A spokesperson for the council said: “[The local authority] acknowledges the issues identified in the audit report and rectifying these issues has been a priority for senior management.
“Resources have been allocated, and significant action has been taken to strengthen controls and processes, and we are satisfied that these matters have now been addressed.”
