Sheriff concedes lax records on top-level employees' time off

Top-level employees at the Philadelphia Sheriff's Office have traded in 220 vacation days worth more than $50,000 in the last three years under a system in which the sheriff does not even track time off for his management team.

Right after Sheriff John D. Green announced Wednesday that he would stay on past his Oct. 31 retirement date to complete a thorough audit of his office by the city controller, he acknowledged that he did not keep detailed records of vacation and sick leave taken by his 17 central staff members.

He called it a "tradition."

Green said his nonunion employees - from executive assistant Constance Little, who earns $110,000 annually, to labor-relations liaison Karen James, at $28,366 - were on call 24/7 and therefore didn't have real vacation days.

"We had no way of compensating these people with overtime. We had no way of compensating these people with comp time," Green said, conceding that he would begin keeping such records at the insistence of City Controller Alan Butkovitz, who released a partial audit Tuesday. "We now have to go back, and we have to develop a way of compensating people if they're called in to come in to work, or if they work more than eight hours."

While the Sheriff's Office was not charging people for vacation days, almost all of them in 2008, 2009, and 2010 traded five vacation days for reimbursement, about $18,000 worth annually, or about $55,000 over three years, according to an Inquirer analysis of information from the controller and the city Department of Human Resources.

During that time, those 17 employees also accrued more than 130 vacation days and more than 200 sick days, according to an Inquirer analysis of figures provided by Butkovitz.

Employees can accrue up to 70 vacation days, to be cashed out upon leaving the city, and can bank 200 sick days and can cash out up to 60 days when they leave city employment.

Green said that it was a way to better compensate his employees and that he had difficulty getting higher salaries through City Council.

"We just cannot do that unilaterally," Green said, before conceding that his vacation-time bonus was his way of getting his employees more money.

Butkovitz criticized the practice in his audit and provided vacation, sick-time, and salary figures on the employees. He noted that eight of 17 employees recorded no leave taken over the last three years. In 2009, 10 employees recorded no time off, and six others reported only one day off. During the audit process, auditors were told by some employees that they were taking days off, and the auditors found that those days off were not recorded as such.

Butkovitz questioned how Green could allow his employees to accrue time if he was not keeping track. "Why doesn't he just pay them whatever he thinks is right?" Butkovitz asked. "How does he know, if he has a policy of not keeping records?"

City Councilman Frank DiCicco, who in June introduced a bill to eliminate the sheriff as an elected office, asked, "How do you do that? How do you justify that, if you're not paying attention to it?"

Recently, city officials have questioned the office's use of overtime for nonexempt employees. Last year, 19 employees, whose base salaries ranged from $47,000 to $64,000, received more than $30,000 each in overtime, The Inquirer reported last week.