Melbourne officers suspended over discrepancies in payroll
MELBOURNE — Two Melbourne police officers received two-week suspensions without pay after an anonymous email triggered an internal investigation into alleged payroll record falsifications.
The investigation concluded that Lt. Steven Sadoff and Officer Brittney Skovsgard failed to be punctual and failed to complete work shifts during various dates between January and June 2017.
In May, both were suspended for 80 hours without pay, suspended from the take-home car program for six months, and deemed ineligible for promotional testing for two years. Sadoff also was demoted to sergeant and transferred to a different shift. These disciplinary actions were scheduled to take effect upon exhaustion of their appeal rights.
The investigation became public last week when Brevard County Clerk of Courts Scott Ellis criticized the investigation at a City Council meeting.
Skovsgard submitted her resignation, effective Friday.
Sadoff is grieving his discipline, and his case is in the grievance process. Police Chief David Gillespie declined an interview request, citing the grievance process.
The department’s Kronos Workforce TeleStaff payroll system was implemented in August 2013 to document employee timekeeping, including overtime, compensatory time and leave time.
Investigators examined officers’ shift starting and ending times that were entered in TeleStaff. They also studied GPS coordinates and data from laptops intheir police cruisers.
Two sergeants also received written reprimands for violating TeleStaff policy, while a detective and an officer were referred for counseling/retraining.
“One of the main purposes of TeleStaff is to accurately track individual work schedules. This includes weekly work schedules including overtime. Officers are responsible for tracking all changes to their regular work schedules and overtime entries,” Gillespie wrote in a statement to Florida Today.
“The impact of false or inaccurate entries becomes an integrity issue when employees are flexing their schedule so they are working different hours than recorded in TeleStaff,” he said.
“Additionally, when officers do not work their entire work day it can be construed as theft as well as administrative violations,” he stated.
The investigation was triggered by an anonymous email complaint in November to Gillespie, City Manager Mike McNees and Melbourne City Council members. The email alleged that some police officers were “falsifying their payroll records on a regular basis,” and it listed the names of the six officers alongside computeraided dispatch records from January to February 2017.
The next morning, McNees emailed city council members: “A few weeks ago we had an officer resign while under investigation for some alleged activity similar to what’s been detailed in this email. Chief Gillespie has already been looking into whether there is evidence of other, similar activities and he will continue that process.”