Audit: Top-level commanders 'enabled' abuse

By Ray Gronberg

gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648

DURHAM -- The commander of the Durham Police Department's patrol officers and detectives has put in her retirement papers, after auditors determined that she personally approved a subordinate's hefty overtime claims.

Deputy Police Chief Beverly "B.J." Council will depart the payroll Dec. 31.

She will go on leave early next week and spend the next few days working with Police Chief Jose Lopez and other senior officials in the department "to ensure an orderly transition," City Manager Tom Bonfield said.

Council as of Wednesday remained in charge of the department's Operations Bureau, Lopez said, contradicting other sources who'd said she'd been relieved on Tuesday.

The announcement came a couple of hours after officials released a report saying that top-level commanders in the department, from Lopez on down, had been aware of and "enabled" an officer's abuse of the city's payroll system.

Council personally signed off on 10 of 12 overtime claims from Officer Alesha Robinson-Taylor, who was overseeing towing and the moonlighting of her fellow officers.

Robinson-Taylor received $62,583 in overtime, and was allowed to record 904 hours of compensatory time.

Council signed off on the claims without insisting on any "detailed documentation" of the officer's work, investigators from the city's Audit Services Department said in their report.

Bonfield said during a Wednesday news conference that he was "personally embarrassed" by the incident, given the possibility of its reflecting on police and other city employees.

He also acknowledged that the payments came while administrations and the City Council were preparing to eliminate positions and lay off employees to deal with a budget crunch.

He declined to discuss Robinson-Taylor's fate, saying that for now state privacy rules prevent that. He said actions there "will be disclosed in the future as the law allows."

Officials do intend to relay the audit's findings to District Attorney Tracey Cline, and to pursue restitution, Bonfield said, adding that they'll be seeking recovery of a figure "probably in the $40,000 range, maybe $45,000."

Lopez said his department is addressing the situation by putting "a lot of alarms" in place to flag potential abuses. It's also reorganizing "secondary employment" oversight, with officials among other things pondering whether it's necessary that a sworn police office handle the job.

But according to the audit, Robinson-Taylor's bosses knew quite a bit about her overtime claims.

The report said Robinson-Taylor's immediate supervisor, Capt. Charlene Balch, executive officer of the Operations Bureau, questioned the officer's claims last fall and took the matter to Council.

Council "acknowledged she was aware" of them but said because the department wasn't allowing Robinson-Taylor to moonlight, "she was allowing her to earn extra time," auditors said.

From that point, Council took responsibility for approving the officer's claims.

The department's top-ranking civilian employee, Administrative Services Bureau Chief Jesse Burwell, also monitored overtime and in April noticed "excessive" payments to Robinson-Taylor.

Burwell notified Lopez and the sworn head of the Administrative Services Bureau, Deputy Police Chief Ron Hodge, and told them "it was not reasonable" for Robinson-Taylor to be earning so much overtime.

Senior officials in the department discussed the matter in an executive team meeting in June.

According to the audit, both Lopez and Council at that time "defended the overtime expenditures in the absence of supporting documentation," with Council again saying that because Robinson-Taylor wasn't allowed to take outside employment, she was "allowing [her] to make the overtime."

Lopez told the auditors -- who investigated the matter at Bonfield's request, after the manager received an e-mailed tip -- that the overtime "did not seem out of line based on his previous assignment," presumably meaning his former job as assistant chief of the police department in Hartford, Conn.

In his formal response to the audit, Lopez told Audit Services Director Germaine Brewington that he and the Police Department now agree Robinson-Taylor's overtime and comp-time claims "were not justifiable or reasonable." He promised corrective action.

"I acknowledge the seriousness of this event and the blemish it has had on the city and this Police Department," Lopez said in his letter.

During and after Wednesday's new conference, Lopez said Robinson-Taylor did work after hours in connection with her job.

The chief added that she'd been given extra duties to offset the potential loss of income because people in her position are barred from moonlighting, to prevent them from cherry-picking the best second-job offers.

The problem, Lopez and auditors said, was that Robinson-Taylor claimed more overtime hours than she actually worked or at the very least can document.

For example, auditors checked her November claims and could see from phone and computer records that she was answering e-mails and entering information into the "Cover Your Assets" system the department uses to track officers' moonlighting.

But for November the auditors could only document 16 hours' worth of extra work. Robinson-Taylor claimed 285.

The auditors said that while it was "evident that [Robinson-Taylor] received e-mails from individuals during all hours," and had posted jobs during all hours, it was not clear she needed to work outside normal business hours.

The audit also found that clerks in the Finance Department's payroll operation had noticed and questioned the overtime claims. But while they told their boss, further inquiry from that quarter stopped after officials in the Police Department told them Council had approved it.

Finance officials now agree they should report such problems to police commanders, and, if they don't see any follow-up, relay their worries to the city manager.

Bonfield said he's concerned that in city government generally, "there is some culture" for employees to let things go if they perceive someone's signed off on them.

But "just because somebody says it's OK doesn't necessarily make it right," Bonfield said. "I would have hoped we'd have had a situation or culture in this organization where nobody was afraid -- well, not necessarily afraid -- but nobody would just let it go at that, that it would have been raised to the city manager's office or to a higher level and say, 'This was approved but something about it just isn't right.'"