Town seeks repayment of extra overtime
129 union employees accidentally overpaid
GREENWICH — The town of Greenwich accidentally overpaid some of its employees to the tune of $10,000 after overtime rules in a new union contract prompted an error in its payroll system.
According to town Director of Human Resources Mary Pepe, the problem affected 129 members of the Greenwich Municipal Employees Association labor union, most of whom work for the Board of Education, from Dec. 24 and Feb. 13. The total overpayment was nearly $10,000 total, with employees receiving differing extra amounts.
“The amounts varied from a couple of dollars to around $700 for the highest (extra) amount to one person,” Pepe said.
This is not “significant amounts of money,” she said. But the town is entitled to have it back because it is an overpayment, she said.
“We have let the union know what’s going on and why,” Pepe said. “I don’t think they were happy, but they certainly understood that people were overpaid and they need to pay it back.”
Attorney Mark Santagata, whose firm Cacace, Tusch and Santagata, serves as counsel for the GMEA union, said they were looking to make certain that everyone was treated fairly in the repayment and “so far that appears to be the case.”
“I think this is a situation both the union and the town would prefer not to have to deal with,” Santagata said. “I don’t think anybody intended this.”
The GMEA represents 426 full- and part-time employees who work for both the town and the school district in clerical and administrative classifications. A new contract went into effect in December, starting with the paychecks for the week of Dec. 24, Pepe said, and changed the level in which members of the union qualify for overtime pay.
Under the old contract, GMEA employees were entitled to overtime if they worked more than 35 hours during a week. The new contract raises the level to eligibility after 37.5 hours, which Pepe said is still below the state standard of eligibility after 40 hours. The overpayment occurred, she said, because the payroll system was not properly adjusted.
“When you have an automated payroll system, you have allow for time to configure the system to do it automatically. And the departments were going to have to do that manually until the system was reconfigured,” Pepe said. “With everything else going on, it wasn’t consistently done across the board, and we discovered that this was not uniformly implemented. Some people were still getting overtime after 35 hours and others were getting it after 37-and-a-half hours.”
It was not “clearly communicated” to all the town departments that this change had to be made manually, Pepe said.
This discrepancy was discovered by the payroll department, she said. And now, she said, the problem has been fixed and every town department is complying with the terms of the new contract.
“We immediately made sure that everyone was doing it the same,” Pepe said. “We went through it and saw the impact of who had been overpaid and we talked to the GMEA. We let them know first and then we figured out what a reasonable payback period was.”
The town has not started collecting back the money, but that is likely to start in June, she said. Santagata said the union intervened to make certain this was handled “as gently as possible and not to overburden any of our members.”
He said he has not heard much reaction from GMEA members, noting most of the overpayments were “relatively small amounts.”
Even though the town is entitled to get the money back, it could not just deduct the amounts from the affected employees’ paychecks without their authorization, Pepe said. Instead, they reached out to the union with a plan: If the overpayment is $50 or less, it will be deducted in one paycheck; and if it was over $50, it will deducted over several paychecks in increments of $50.
“The vast majority of them are being paid off in two payments,” Pepe said. “This did not go on for a long period of time.”
Each of the 129 GMEA members who got the overpayments must sign authorization forms before the deduction can take place, she said.
After the forms are signed, the GMEA members will have the chance to ask questions of the town or the union, Santagata said.