A total of 94 Baltimore City Sheriff’s Deputies were overpaid by three times their regular salaries from late 2023 through February 2024, according to a report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in Baltimore.
The report states that a faulty pay code in Workday, a payroll system, resulted in employees collectively receiving overpayments of nearly $2.24 million during this period.
On March 6, 2024, the Office of the Inspector General received a complaint alleging potential waste and misuse of authority by Baltimore City Sheriff Samuel Cogen. It claimed he had emailed Baltimore City Sheriff’s Office employees with instructions on how to configure their electronic time sheets to receive extra pay.
The OIG’s office confirmed the tip by obtaining a copy of a Nov. 14, 2023 e-mail that instructs employees how to enter their work hours to collect an extra $15 an hour using the ‘City Detail Overtime’ pay code. However, that pay code was misconfigured in Workday, and the deputies who followed Cogen’s instructions were paid triple the amount they would have earned for a regular eight-hour workday.
For example, the OIG says that a deputy’s pay without the pay code for 94 hours was $3,179.36, while the compensation with the pay code for 95.5 hours was $10,456,34.
Cogen told the OIG’s office that he didn’t know about the Workday misconfiguration when he issued the order. He said he did it to help resolve the office’s difficulty in hiring and retaining employees and that it was intended to be a “stop-gap” to raise deputies’ pay until the city agreed to discuss raising salaries.
“We were looking for a legal way to give these guys some more money so they would come to work, and so we could recruit people and so we could serve the city, and we found that Clause G was that: It was the legal way to do it,” Cogen told authorities during the investigation.
The faulty pay code was deactivated on Feb. 26, 2024.
As of the release of the OIG report, the city of Baltimore has not requested the incorrect payments to be returned, and the OIG office says that the Baltimore City Sheriff’s Office and the Departments of Finance & Law should collaborate on how to handle to retrieval of the erroneously issued funds in accordance with the City Administrative Manual.
