BALTIMORE — The Sheriff who authorized the regular use of a pay code that ultimately led to the overpayment of $2.3 million in taxpayer funds say deputies are now not receiving the money they deserve.
On Wednesday, the Office of the Inspector General released a detailed 20 page investigative report detailing how the payments ballooned over the course of a year, later discovered by the city's Finance department.
The Sheriff's controversial directive for all deputies to use the "City Detail Overtime" code in November 2023 was exacerbated by a systemic error in the city's payroll system, Workday.
"A deputy sheriff that was making $3,000 was suddenly making almost $11,000," Inspector General of Baltimore City Isabel Cumming said.
"It was almost a perfect storm in that he wanted to give his employees an increase. He was working with the mayor and doing that. Then he thought that he found a way to do so. However, unbeknownst to him, this misconfiguration caused the money to go far beyond he what he even interpreted," she added.
Cumming has noted that the total overpayment is more than her office's entire budget.
The city has since removed the pay code from its system.
Hear Baltimore City Inspector General speak on the latest report regarding the city's sheriff's office
In a statement to WMAR-2 News Baltimore City Sheriff Sam Cogen said:
“It’s unfortunate that this ongoing programmatic error in the City’s Workday system has deprived Sheriff’s Deputies of proper payment of the compensation they have earned under the current labor agreement for over a year now. I will continue working with Mayor Scott’s Finance team to correct the mistakes in their payroll system.
Since I took office, I activated deputy sheriffs to become more engaged in suppressing crime in Baltimore City in a way they have not been for over a decade. I don’t want us to lose sight of the fact that the money at issue is payment owed to them for their contributions to the historic reductions in homicides that we have seen.”
"[The sheriff] interpreted that crime suppression was what the sheriffs were doing all the time. And so his interpretation of that allowed them to use that overtime for all their working hours," Cumming explained.
Though previous investigations from her office have resulted in criminal charges, she says that the matter does not appear to be criminal in nature.
"In order to prove you would have to have intent. At this time, we don't know of an intent. When we met with him, he said that... there was a mistake in this," Cumming said.
She also says the city has mechanisms to recoup the money.
The Mayor's Office squarely blamed the "misuse" of the money on the "expansive and deliberate abuse of the detail designation."
The Sheriff's Office is currently in arbitration over the matter with the Labor Commissioner.
