Payroll SNAFU Costs County $102,000
Commissioners Promise, “Never Again”
LOCK HAVEN – It cost Clinton County government $102,049 to track down and correct payroll errors attributed to a terminated payroll clerk.
The county commissioners made that disclosure at their meeting today and said checks-and-balances are in place to prevent any future payroll problems.
The commissioners released the results of a nearly yearlong investigation of payroll discrepancies affecting what turned out to be 108 county employees over a three year period.
The payroll problem had been publicly disclosed by the commissioners in February of last year; at that time they announced the termination of then payroll clerk Susan Conway. They also said there had been no fraud and no money displaced.
Today’s report culminated an extended investigation to track down the problem. County technology specialist Suzy Watson said the probe determined the root of the problem were errors in the set-up of the payroll software, not the software itself.
Watson was present along with Cory Johnson from the county-retained auditing firm of Zelenkofske Axelrod and the county’s new payroll clerk Tammy Reinhard, explaining the review of payroll records going back to 2011 and the man-hours involved, what board chairman Pete Smeltz called a “cleanup.”
ZA’s Johnson said some 1,500 hours were devoted to the process, “to make sure it got fixed and can’t happen again.”
All three commissioners today talked about the time involved to go back through the payroll records for better than 200 county employees, the process described as a line item review by Smeltz.
The final tab included $86,000 paid to the Zelenkofske firm and another $31,000 to local CPA Lee Ann Plessinger, LLC. Back in February the commissioners had said the total cost could go as high as $80,000 but they hoped it would be half that.
The final tally showed the county received nearly $17,000 in refunds from the Internal Revenue Service for county overpayment of withholding dollars. The commissioners also disclosed for the first time the IRS had filed a lien against the county courthouse in 2012 because the county was short a small amount on a withholding payment; the commissioners said the IRS notice heightened their resolve to probe the problem, one they said they had become aware of earlier in 2012 and had already begun their investigation. The lien was later removed in 2012. Commissioner Jeff Snyder called the $10,000 IRS lien “ridiculous.”
Errors uncovered included improper information on employees’ W-2 forms, retirement deductions and tax rates. County expenses relative to its probe also included $1,040 in reimbursements to county employees for the cost of those employees filing amended W-2 forms with the IRS.
