The union representing Honolulu police officers says a city audit detailing the Honolulu Police Department’s “ineffective” management of overtime payments that ballooned to $38 million in fiscal year 2019 validates its repeated warnings that staffing, recruitment and retention should be immediately improved.

The audit, released Friday, found that the department uses handwritten time cards to track overtime hours, resulting in nearly $30,000 in unsubstantiated payments and up to $6 million in increased city pension costs over the past five years. The top 10 unnamed earners scooped more than $4 million for 76,726 hours of overtime pay over five years, city Auditor Arushi Kumar found.

The highest earner made an average of about $123,000 in overtime per year in that time period — on top of the officer’s normal salary. The officer made $616,266 working 13,487 hours of overtime during those fiscal years.

A metropolitan police recruit earns $65,652 per year and up to $73,556 including standard of conduct pay. That improves to $68,244 per year and up to $76,148 in base pay with the standard of conduct differential for a starting officer who graduates from HPD’s Ke Kula Makai training academy in Waipahu.

After completing the necessary years of service, police officers receive automatic step increases as outlined in the collective bargaining agreement SHOPO signed with the city, and officers’ base salary can be up to $98,268 without the standard of conduct differential.

The officers’ current contact allows for officers to be paid a night differential, OT is calculated at 1.5 times the base hourly rate and officers also receive a meal allowance for overtime work, according to HPD.

“With over 2,100 authorized officers, paper overtime time cards are voluminous and difficult to monitor. Furthermore, the integrity of manual overtime time cards are at risk because they can be easily misinterpreted, altered, falsified, or lost,” read the audit Kumar and her team wrote.

The City Auditor’s Office selected a sample of 1,327 overtime time cards from the eight HPD patrol districts between FY 2016 and FY 2020, and compared the data on the cards with the hours entered into the HPD computer system’s overtime database used for payroll.

“Our review revealed that many timecards are missing, timecard details are unclear, and overtime hours may not be logged in the PT&A (pay, time and attendance) system or may be paid without sufficient documentation,” reads the audit. “Our review and analysis confirmed that inconsistencies in HPD’s overtime process are causing these various discrepancies found in our sample. With missing overtime cards that were paid nearly $30,000 from our sample, we question the risk of human error that could also result in fraud, waste, or abuse from HPD’s current overtime process.”

Interim HPD Chief Rade Vanic, in a letter responding to Kumar’s findings, wrote the audit was “comprehensive and fair” and acknowledged that use of paper time cards for documenting overtime is “not relevant” and alternatives will be considered for a system implemented more than 30 years ago.

“The HPD is open to the audit report recommendations and is convinced that the current OT policies provide a good framework to build clear, consistent and effective OT management,” wrote Vanic. “Standardizing and centralizing OT policies and procedures will be a goal in our continuing efforts to better serve the community.”

On April 14, 2021, the Honolulu City Council adopted Resolution 21-58, requesting an audit of HPD’s overtime policies after members were concerned about the $38 million in OT payments in FY 2019 that made up 15% of total salary expenditures and 12.75% of HPD’s total operating budget.

The State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers union said the audit further justifies its recent criticism of department staffing levels.

“SHOPO welcomes the results of the HPD Overtime Usage and Policies audit because it validates our repeated warnings about the dire staffing crisis our department is grappling with and the lack of a comprehensive and measurable plan to recruit and retain officers. The reliance upon overtime to accomplish the most basic function of any police department, responding to 911 calls, is an indictment of the failed policies that have brought us to this point,” said Robert Cavaco, SHOPO president and an HPD lieutenant. “HPD is down over 300 officers, and we are hopeful that incoming Chief (Arthur “Joe”) Logan will work with stakeholders to incentivize officers who are retirement eligible to stay and produce a plan to recruit qualified officers to replace those that do leave. Years of overtime are wearing down the health and safety of our officers and it is time to address the elephant in the room; a lack of investment to address HPD’s recruitment and retention crisis is making our neighborhoods and shopping districts less safe. We hope this audit is an impetus to act with a sense of urgency.”

HPD’s policies and procedures for managing overtime are “inconsistently applied and interpreted across the various HPD districts and divisions,” the audit found.

“This results in overall ineffective management of overtime, including an unequal distribution of overtime hours among officers. Additionally, overtime cards, which document overtime requests and approval for payroll purposes, are managed manually, increasing the risk for human error, abuse, and fraud,” wrote Kumar. “We also found that there are no limits to the amount of overtime an individual officer can work. HPD is experiencing officer shortages caused by various factors, including special assignments, decreasing training academy graduation rates, and increasing uniformed retirements. Overtime is the primary tool to address these shortages, but by allowing an unlimited use of overtime, HPD is not accounting for risks such as officer fatigue.”

HPD attributed the rise in overtime payments to changing patrol staffing minimums and rising vacancies “due to difficulty in recruiting qualified personnel.” In FY 2021, 1,601 officers were assigned to patrol in Oahu’s eight police districts.

In 2018 the minimum number of officers on duty per day was 75% of total patrol officers. Strategic initiatives increased that minimum to 80% in 2019, then to 85% in 2020, and was scheduled to rise to 90% in 2021. It was cut back to 75% because of budget shortfalls created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Edicts to cut spending also led to the decline in overtime pay in 2020, but HPD was “unable to meet staffing minimums in certain districts in FY 2020,” the audit found.

Overtime use at patrol districts has increased by nearly 166%, from 163,104 hours in FY 2016 to 433,968 hours in FY 2020.

“High police overtime spending is of concern to the city council and public, amid many related factors including social unrest, decreasing favorable perception of the police nationwide, budget shortfalls due to the COVID-­19 pandemic, and reports of officer abuse of overtime,” read the audit.

Violations of the department’s OT policy were acknowledged in December 2020 by former Chief Susan Ballard, who launched internal investigations and partly blamed enforcement of COVID-19 emergency orders for the increases.

The audit report makes six recommendations to improve HPD’s overtime policies, including standardizing and centralizing overtime policies and procedures for all patrol districts and nonpatrol divisions, disposing of manual time cards and evaluating minimum staffing percentages.