County to study need for HR department amid timesheet discrepancies

Discussion became heated Monday during the Miller County Quorum Court Budget and Finance Committee meeting.

Chairman Ernest Pender said the issue at hand was whether the county should consider hiring a human resources director and also put the payroll person in the county clerk’s office under that position to perform their usual duties.

County Clerk Stephanie Harvin said there had been discrepancies with timesheets from the sheriff’s office and the jail. She said her office was spending time to reconcile the issue and had reached out to the agencies, but that she was not comfortable with paying for hours that she could not verify on the timesheets.

Pender said it was not her office’s responsibility to enforce any policy change, to which she replied that she was following the county’s guidelines and that everyone should because when her office is audited by the state, she’s the one who ends up responsible if there are discrepancies.

“We need them to follow the guidelines in the book as well,” she said. “It is your responsibility for you to contact us, not for us to contact you.”

Justice John Haltom said he was neither for, nor against hiring an HR director for the county’s almost 300 employees, but that the records needed to be reconciled so everyone gets the wages, compensation time and vacation they are owed.

“If our records are not right, we need to get our records and make sure,” he said. “It concerns me that we’re sitting here trying to have a discussion and we really don’t know whose records are right. We need to have a reconciliation of records. As a county, we need to take care of this. We need to be fair to our employees, but we also need to be fair to our taxpayers.”

Harvin said the issue also concerned two employees who had personality conflicts and that her office would work to see that those are resolved.

Pender said the county would continue to study whether they needed an HR department and that, at this point, the committee would not bring a resolution before the Quorum Court in support of hiring one.