By: David Quagliani
Call it a case of overtime gone overboard.
In 2019, a state employee named Denise Williams recorded a whopping 3,600 hours of overtime and scored $231,000 in overtime payments.
Williams, a security training assistant the 200-bed Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in Manhattan, brought home a reported $322,000, which sources say was the most in overtime of any state worker in New York.
“It was the second year in a row she topped the overtime earners list, the records obtained by the USA TODAY Network New York through a Freedom of Information request showed.
“In 2018, Williams registered 3,560 hours of overtime last year, leading to $200,000 in overtime alone,” reported Gannett New York. “Three state workers raked in more than 3,000 hours in overtime in 2019, prompting Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli to caution state agencies to take care when allowing overtime.”
“All of the state’s top overtime earners work at state medical or correctional facilities, working thousands of additional hours in overtime,” DiNapoli said in a prepared statement. “We need to make sure agencies are managing overtime efficiently and not putting staff or patients in danger as they clock in so many extra hours.”
Freeman Klopott, a spokesman for the state Budget Division, said in his own prepared statement that the state has limited overtime. “State spending on agencies has been nearly flat under this administration — as average annual spending growth has remained below 2% making it possible to lower income tax rates for every New Yorker. Agencies use overtime carefully and only when needed. The alternative would be a larger, more bloated, more expensive, and less efficient state bureaucracy that New York taxpayers simply can’t afford.”
Williams earned $278,001.04 in 2018, with $200,442.30 of that in overtime pay, records show.
State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli told the New York Post in an interview that “fraud is not suspected among the top overtime earners such as Williams, but added that there’s concern the employees could be overworked.
“All of the state’s top overtime earners work at state medical or correctional facilities, working thousands of additional hours in overtime,” DiNapoli said. “We need to make sure agencies are managing overtime efficiently and not putting staff or patients in danger as they clock in so many extra hours.”
New York state’s medical centers and prisons have long had the highest overtime costs because they need to operate around the clock, according to poststar.com. “The Office of Mental Health, which oversees the psychiatric centers, said overtime is used only in order to comply with minimum staffing requirements. “Our procedures are driven by staff seniority and union requirements, and the agency is required by union agreements to exhaust voluntary overtime opportunities before mandating employees to work overtime,” the agency said.”
