Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel ran a story last week about corrections officers who have bumped up their pay by taking advantage of the way sick leave and overtime pay are set up. There are all kinds of points made in the article regarding how much or little abuse there has been of sick leave, and how difficult and stressful the work is, etc., all of which are important to the overall story. There’s one bit that leapt out front and center to me, however:

• Eight of the officers 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 shift they were sick, and time and a half for the eight or more hours of overtime work.

I’m trying to fathom how Wisconsin’s system could be set up so as to pay overtime to someone who had not put in any work hours earlier that day. Or, if they played the shifts so they were on different calendar days, why didn’t any red flags pop up with people having a sick day followed by a two-shift day?

Of course, if a system is configured that way, there will be people who discover it and then exploit it. That’s in the “D’oh” category. But how in the world have Wisconsin bureaucrats missed this elephant-sized detail? And especially bureaucrats who deal with state payouts?? Where was the State Auditor? The story covers incidents of sick leave abuse in 2006. This apparently isn’t a recent or short-term phenomenon.

Still and all, this should be the worst kind of bureaucratic problem we face: one in which people have made mistakes, costly though they be, but mistakes. This situation touches on deficient personal ethics of the officers who milked the system, but the flaw they exploited appears to have been an innocent one. That’s different from corrupt government officials intentionally setting things up (e.g. “no bid contracts”) so as to benefit themselves and their cronies, as we have seen so often during the Bush administration.

Kudos to the Journal Sentinel for a fine piece of investigative reporting, and here’s to the state of Wisconsin finding their coffers stretched a little less for it.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen