Case Study:

Happy Valley Hospital SystemPolice Department

Happy Valley Hospital System (HVHS) is a multi-campus hospital network which delivers medical and health care services in the St. Louis, Missouri regional area. The primary hospital locations are in St. Peters, Chesterfield, Clayton and Bridgeton Missouri. HVHS employs some 1,500 full-time and 300 part-time employees and services on average some 60,000 patients per year. The central headquarters offices for HVHS are co-located at the Clayton, Missouri hospital facility.

The police department at HVHS is comprised of 60 full-time Police Officers and 20 part-time Police Officers distributed across all four campuses, each of which has a police lieutenant on site. A new reporting organization structure was put in place 18 months prior utilizing newly appointed lieutenants as leaders for each campus. The lieutenants in turn report to a central System Chief of Police (Chief) located at the headquarters offices. The primary duty of a campus Police Officer is to provide safety and security services to all employees, patients and visitors at their respective campuses. Police Officers are often times called upon for alternate and extra duty assignments and often times experience numerous schedule and shift changes due to various factors such as special events, coverage for absences of other officers, unanticipated emergencies, etc.

During a recent accounting audit it was noted that salary expenditures within the System Police Department were tracking significantly unfavorable to budget. The CFO brought this finding to the Chief to find out what was occurring. The Chief in turn communicated the situation to his lieutenants who in turn were instructed to review duty rosters against payroll timekeeping entries to validate time paid for time worked. Lieutenants were given 5 business days to report their findings.

Time reporting for payroll purposes for police officers at HVHS is a two-part process. The payroll also runs bi-weekly. Officers must complete a manual Time and Attendance (TA) exception form in hard copy to their respective lieutenants for approval. Officers concurrently enter their exceptions electronically into the HVHS payroll system via the HRIS portal. The electronic entries into the portal are what actually generates the paychecks. As the process is an exception process, it is presumed that the normal workweek consists of 40 hours. Only exceptions are notated via the TA and entered electronically. The following is a list of exceptions that officers are to report both via the TA and when making electronic entries:

Holiday Overtime Sick Leave Personal Leave with Pay Personal Leave without Pay Bereavement 2nd Shift Differential Overtime on 2nd Shift Differential 3rd Shift Differential Overtime on 3rd Shift Differential Shift Change Schedule Change Doc Pay

Upon receipt of the lieutenants reports, the Chief noted that all reports indicated that all time TA reports correlated accurately with duty assignments. The Chief requested a report from the payroll department of the entries that were made electronically to compare against the lieutenants information and found numerous inconsistencies between what was submitted via the manual hard-copy TAs and what was entered electronically resulting in significant overpayments (and in some cases underpayments) to officers. Over the course of the prior fiscal year the unfavorable variance amounted to close to $150,000 and some officers were owed in total $25,000.

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