State Workers Paid to Stay Home
What a waste of tax money
| Illinois (Globe Turner, LLC / November 23, 2012) |
Between 2007 and September of this year, 2,033 state workers were placed on paid leave at various times, at a cost of more than $23 million. Employees placed on paid administrative leave are typically being investigated for alleged wrongdoing. Maybe an employee has been accused of stealing, mistreating someone or doing campaign work on state time. While the investigation drags on, the employee continues to collect a paycheck, oftentimes for months—and in some cases, years.
Nearly 70 of the workers identified by the Tribune collected paychecks for at least a year without doing a lick of work. One employee drew more than 1,100 days of paid leave. Did this set off any alarms in state government? No. "I didn't have to call in. The checks just kept coming in the mail," retired veterans affairs employee Christine Znaniecki told the reporters.
How convenient. Not only can a worker stay home and watch TV, the state will mail his or her paycheck to the house.
So who's to blame for this? You would need about 32 index fingers pointing in different directions to answer that.
Executive Inspector General Ricardo Meza handles most of the paid-leave cases. His office is responsible for collecting information about the accusations that resulted in the leave and then handing off the file to law enforcement or the governor's office, which decides what to do next. Meza's budget is about $7.2 million. He oversees about 70 employees, 20 of whom are investigators and 15 of whom are lawyers assisting with investigations. During the previous fiscal year, his department handled 2,492 cases.
Meza is not the state's only inspector. Each constitutional officer has at least one, and a handful of state agencies have their own as well. The Department of Human Services has its own inspector general with offices in Chicago and Springfield. More than half of the paid leave cases identified by the Tribune came from human services, and many of the employees involved had been placed on leave more than once.
This isn't the first time the Human Services Department is making headlines for management lapses. The former human services inspector general, William Davis, resigned in July after a downstate newspaper revealed his office failed to investigate 53 suspicious deaths of disabled adults.
The answer isn't more inspectors general. The answer is fewer employees placed on paid leave, quicker investigations and less bureaucracy. The lack of communication between state government silos is a problem. If an inspector general is involved and then the attorney general or state police take a look, expect a lengthy paid "vacation" for the accused employee.
Gov. Pat Quinn and representatives of the state's biggest employee union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, emphasize that workers are entitled to due process. Investigations can't be rushed. AFSCME says employees want a speedy resolution to their cases so they can go back to work.
But taxpayers deserve a voice here too. No employee should be sitting at home for months and months, collecting tax money while the state takes its sweet time figuring out what to do. If an accusation is trumped up, the worker should swiftly be sent back to work. If an accusation is true, the worker should get a suspension or a pink slip, not a paycheck. The state must prove its case in a timely fashion — or send the employees back to work.
Copyright © 2012, Chicago Tribune
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