The Associated Press
MADISON, Wis. — A number of officers with the state Department of Corrections routinely rack up hefty paychecks by working overtime and then calling in sick to recoup their time off, a newspaper’s investigation has revealed.
It’s not clear how widespread the practice is, and corrections officials insist that every field has a small minority of people who abuse the system. But at least one state legislator says the practice represents an abuse to taxpayers that must be addressed.
The analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel focused on state records as well as the weekly timesheets of the state’s 20 highest-paid correctional officers for 2006.
For one Green Bay Correctional Institution officer, October 2006 was apparently a busy month.
On every day he was scheduled to be off, he worked an overtime shift, including working a double shift twice. But he also called in sick four days that month, meaning he got both overtime pay and paid time off.
He used almost four weeks of sick leave that year and netted $117,764 with overtime, making him the state’s fourth-highest-paid correctional officer that year.
Other high-paid correctional officers showed questionable use of their sick leave but none faced discipline over the practice, the investigation found.
Sen. Alberta Darling, a member of the state Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee, called the practice “totally unacceptable.”
“This is just blatantly an abuse that has to be addressed,” said Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills. “We cannot have people just going their own way to fatten their own pocketbooks at the taxpayer’s expense.”
But Daniel Meehan, an officer at Waupun Correctional Institution and president of the Wisconsin State Employees Union Local 18, said abuse of sick leave is not the norm.
“I’m not calling in sick all the time, and there’s a lot of people that don’t,” Meehan said. “There’s 10,000 employees at the Department of Corrections. You’re going to have every extreme that there is when you’ve got that many employees.”
Among the newspaper’s other findings for the 20 highest-paid correctional officers:
-- Eight called in sick for a shift and then picked up the immediate next shift at least once. They received eight hours of regular pay for the sick-leave shift and time-and-a-half for all the overtime work.
-- One Redgranite Correctional Institution officer more than doubled her salary with overtime pay. She used nearly 23 days of sick leave and was paid $97,280 that year, including $51,042 in overtime.
-- Officers on average use about 100 hours of sick leave per year. The average for all state employees of 66 hours of sick leave.
-- Officers can use three weeks of sick leave a year before management puts them on a watch list for potential abuse. Officers can get themselves off the watch list by using less than 40 hours of sick leave in four months.
The state did not release any of the officers’ names because of its labor agreement with the officers union.
Sick-leave use may be higher at the Department of Corrections than at other agencies because prisons have to be staffed around the clock and because the work is stressful, department secretary Amy Smith said.
Because of staffing needs, when one officer call in sick another is often asked to work an overtime shift.
In some cases, liberal use of sick leave may not be an abuse of department policy. Officers earn between three and four weeks of sick leave per year, and accrued sick leave carries over from one year to the next.
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Information from: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, http://www.jsonline.com