I must applaud Doris Brooks and her Office of the Public Auditor. She has been tireless in ferreting out corruption and abuse in GovGuam. Her latest tour-de-force is the final review and audit of payroll practices at the Department of Corrections. This story initially broke back in November of 2002, when it was revealed that personnel at the prison were taking home 3 times their base pay in undocumented overtime, hazardous pay, and holiday pay. Now that the audit is complete, she is sticking to her guns, pressing for tighter controls at the prison, and forwarding the audit to the attorney general for possible prosecution.
She found all sorts of chicanery going on at DOC, including exempt supervisory employees collecting overtime.
We also found that the Chief Parole Officer reported a total of 1,055 hours of overtime in FY2001 and a total of 458 hours by the nine months ending June 2002. These constitute overtime costs of $40,654 and $17,649, respectively. The Department of Labor, in its January 2000 audit report, did not specifically address the Chief Parole Officer�s exempt status (see summary in page 8). However, the Chief Parole Officer�s responsibility does not appear to meet the non-exempt criteria stated as he wields supervisory and administrative power over the DOC�s Parole Services Division. Therefore, we concluded that the position of the Chief Parole Officer may not have been duly authorized to incur overtime.
She also detailed the adventures of the facility superintendent, who collected 62 hours of overtime and hazardous duty pay in a three day period that he was transporting a prisoner back to Guam. This story was featured in a media report last November when the superintendent appeared on the evening news defending his overtime as a cost cutting measure. Try and figure that one out.