Mistakenly doubled salary explains state government

By Chris Powell

Miracle of miracles, Connecticut’s Correction Department has arranged to recover a total of nearly $164,000 spent in 54 mistaken salary overpayments to an employee who was the highlight of a report by the state auditors in August. 

Correction Commissioner Angel Quiros disclosed the repayment plan the other day in a letter to two state legislators who had inquired about the embarrassing case: the Senate Republican minority leader, Brookfield’s Stephen Harding, and Sen. John A. Kissel of Enfield, the ranking Republican senator on the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee.

The commissioner said the overpaid employee, Lt. Devone Bishop, already has repaid $42,000 with about $122,000 still due and to be repaid in payroll deductions. The deductions began last year and are to continue for another five years.

Of course there always will be occasional mistakes with payroll in any organization as large as the Correction Department, but the auditors’ report said the department has much more trouble with money than it should. In his letter to the senators, Commissioner Quiros blamed the overpayments on complicated collective bargaining agreements covering many bargaining units, high turnover in payroll positions, and the classification of those positions as merely entry level.

But there are many unspoken problems here too. 

1) The overpayments to the lieutenant, each more than $3,000, were made in 54 bi-weekly checks, which means they extended over nearly two years before they were caught. This suggests not only negligent payroll handling but also negligent budgeting. In effect for two years the department was paying for an extra employee who didn’t exist.

2) The lieutenant took the mistaken money for nearly two years without reporting it to a supervisor. The mistaken money nearly doubled her salary, so she couldn’t have been unaware of the problem. As a lieutenant she was and — in what may be a wonder of collective bargaining — remains a supervisor herself. How can the commissioner and Governor Lamont still have confidence in the integrity of such an employee?

3) The commissioner’s letter to the senators hints that he doesn’t need to have such confidence — that even if he didn’t have confidence in the lieutenant, given the restrictions of collective bargaining, he couldn’t fire her anyway. Indeed, the situation is more absurd insofar as the lieutenant, in what may be another wonder of collective bargaining, appears to have been given a raise even after her taking the mistaken money was discovered, and to recover the money she dishonestly accepted for two years the department has guaranteed her employment for another five.

4) What exactly did the lieutenant do with all that money that has prevented her from repaying more of it by now? 

5) Things this wild would not happen and just be shrugged off in any organization trying to be efficient. In an organization trying to be efficient there would be consequences. But the commissioner told the senators that, apart from the lieutenant’s six-year repayment plan, the only consequences in this case were that some payroll personnel were “counseled and retrained” — not fired, demoted, penalized financially, or even merely reprimanded. 

This failure of accountability is apparently another result of collective bargaining, since any actual discipline could be appealed to the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration, whose purpose usually seems to be to ensure that no unionized state government employee is ever held accountable for misconduct or incompetence.

6) Finally, the case of the sticky-fingered lieutenant was only the most sensational part of the audit of the Correction Department. The audit also found that financial mismanagement in the department is pervasive, involving payments for compensatory time, overtime, workers’ compensation, union leave, and raises awarded prior to evaluations. But the audit has passed without any acknowledgment or comment from the governor, a Democrat, or from Democratic state legislators, who overwhelmingly control the General Assembly. 

That is, even the grossest mismanagement in state government seems to bother only a couple of Republican legislators. When mismanagement benefits unionized state employees, a politically active and pernicious special interest, most elected officials in Connecticut wave the public interest goodbye. 

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)  

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