The District’s auditor is launching a review into overtime practices at the Department of Employment Services, where some employees in recent months have asserted they were not properly compensated for working extra hours during the pandemic.
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D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson notified DOES about the audit in a Feb. 15 letter, writing that its preliminary scope will range from Oct. 1, 2019, to Dec. 31, 2021, and focus on the agency’s unemployment compensation office.
A recent D.C. budget report shows that DOES spent about $1,473,000 in overtime pay in fiscal 2020 — up from $438,000 in fiscal 2019.
The audit follows a 2018 report from Patterson’s office that found D.C.'s overall spending on overtime for public employees had increased from $40.5 million to $108.2 million between 2011 and 2017. The spending boost was largely concentrated at four city agencies: Fire and Emergency Medical Services, D.C. police, the Department of Corrections and the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. At the time, auditors recommended that D.C. boost hiring to avoid relying so much on overtime and monitor payments more closely.
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According to Patterson’s letter, DOES was identified then as an agency with increased overtime spending, but it was not selected for review until now.
The newest review, the letter said, seeks to determine whether the management of overtime in DOES’s benefits division is consistent with internal policy and guidance from the city’s Department of Human Resources, “and whether those practices are sufficient to minimize the risk of waste, fraud or abuse.” DOES is itself home to the city’s Office of Wage-Hour Education and Enforcement, which is responsible for enforcing the city’s overtime laws and helping private-sector employees recover unpaid wages.
Lawsuit alleges D.C. government denied or withheld unemployment benefits from workers without explanation
The review is set to begin in earnest March 7 with an introductory meeting between the agencies about the audit process, the letter said. The process will take about 10 months.
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The audit marks just the latest action around overtime payments at DOES. In June, in response to concerns from DOES employees who lamented late and missing overtime payments, D.C. Council member Elissa Silverman (I-At Large), whose committee oversees DOES, asked the Department of Human Resources to conduct a pay audit into DOES’s unemployment compensation office to determine “whether employees are being paid accurately and on time.”
Silverman asked for pay-related information for all employees in the unemployment benefits division who worked overtime between Feb. 28 and May 8, 2021.
In a response letter two months later, DCHR’s then-Director Ventris C. Gibson reported that five employees out of the 102 in the audit’s scope “were paid at an incorrect overtime rate,” receiving standard pay instead of time-and-a-half for dozens or, in some cases, hundreds of overtime hours, according to data compiled by DCHR. In the letter, Gibson attributed the error to coding issues and said the problem was corrected, adding that “future overtime hours will be paid accurately.”
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But in a follow-up letter in October, Silverman asked for more granular details on how DCHR would help DOES ensure the problem would not recur. She noted that DCHR did not specify exactly how it planned to prevent future issues with employees being paid at the wrong rate and later than expected.
Stalled payments, conflicting answers: D.C. unemployment woes trigger investigation
“Is it truly necessary to have multiple supervisors review and sign off on each employee’s overtime hours? Can these forms be issued and approved electronically?” Silverman asked. “These questions are simply a guide, but could help prevent future problems and address any errors that occurred outside the limited frame of this audit.”
Earlier this month, in a written response to questions from Silverman’s office related to overtime issues, Director Unique Morris-Hughes said her agency conducted its own review examining a period between Feb. 21, 2021, and June 19, 2021, to determine whether there were any other pay-related issues. They found "an additional seven errors.”
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“The errors have been corrected and the impacted employees have been paid,” Morris-Hughes wrote. She added that DOES had fixed coding issues and adjusted its processes “to ensure overtime is approved promptly and reported and paid on the appropriate weeks.”
The D.C. auditor’s probe also comes as three former DOES employees who managed the handling of unemployment claims — Andre Chisolm, Charlene Wright and Cassagnol Innocent — are suing the city, alleging that the agency failed to fully pay out hundreds of overtime hours they worked during the pandemic.
According to the suit, which was filed in D.C. Superior Court by DCWageLaw attorney Justin Zelikovitz, Chisolm worked 857 hours of overtime in 2020 and 2021 but was paid at his regular rate of $40.84 per hour, rather than the time-and-a-half overtime rate.
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DOES paid Chisolm back wages for 65 of those hours in October, the complaint says, but Chisolm says the city still owes him for the remaining 792 he worked. The suit identifies Chisolm as one of the five employees captured in the DCHR audit but asserts that the issues around his pay were corrected only for the time period for which Silverman requested records.
Chisolm said he also received an unexplained cash transfer for $8,569 from the District in November, after the lawsuit was first served, but the complaint says the city still owes him more than $57,000 in unpaid wages, damages and court fees.
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Wright and Innocent were added to the suit last month after they contacted Zelikovitz with similar stories, Zelikovitz said.
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According to the complaint, Wright was not paid any wages for 40 hours of overtime worked in September and was paid a standard rate for 82 hours of overtime worked in October. Innocent, the suit alleges, worked 60 hours each week between Dec. 1, 2020, and April 20, 2021 — about 420 overtime hours — and was not paid for that extra time. Innocent received an unannounced cash transfer for about $3,011 in November, according to the suit.
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Wright is seeking $18,575 in unpaid wages and damages. Innocent is seeking $111,880.
“In this failure, DOES not only betrayed its own mandate, but also failed the thousands of unemployed D.C. workers whose unemployment insurance claims have not been processed on a timely basis,” the suit reads.
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Diane Watkins, a spokeswoman for DOES, said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.
In another filing, lawyers for the District categorically denied the bulk of the employees’ allegations, including the amount of overtime they worked, the apparent unexplained payments and the amount of pay they say DOES still owes them — adding that “any overtime pay owed to the plaintiff was correctly calculated and has already been paid.”
Separate from Patterson’s audit, the D.C. Office of the Inspector General announced late last month that it would launch its own audit of D.C. agencies’ overtime usage, assessing whether they are adhering to policies and how it has affected city operations.
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An August memo that previewed the Office of the Inspector General’s fiscal 2022 audits noted that before the pandemic, certain agencies, including D.C. police and the Office of Unified Communications, "regularly used significant amounts of overtime in the normal course of business.” Events in recent years — the pandemic, First Amendment protests and the uptick in gun violence in the city — have increased overtime usage among agencies that were already heavily relying on it, the memo said.
“The audit team will start at a high level and may delve deeper into particular District agencies,” Office of the Inspector General spokesman Matthew Wilcoxson said in an email. “Since we are early on in this project, we have not yet conducted any work in a specific District agency.”
The inspector general’s office announced last year that it would examine DOES’s ability to process unemployment claims, too, amid myriad complaints from workers about missing and delayed unemployment payments. That audit has been delayed.