State audit faults Farmingdale schools for overtime procedures

Farmingdale school district officials failed to follow proper procedures in dispensing overtime pay including $167,034 for nonemergency work, the state comptroller’s office said Wednesday.

The findings were among nine audits of local school districts and governments released by the office of State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli.

Farmingdale school officials said that while they appreciate the audits as a way of ensuring proper procedures are followed and will implement some recommendations, they disagreed with some of the findings.

The report, covering the audit period of July 1, 2021 to April 30, 2023, stated that “district officials did not properly monitor, approve and control overtime. Officials also did not ensure all overtime payments were necessary and properly supported. As a result, there is a significant risk that employees may have been paid for unnecessary overtime work that could have been avoided with adequate planning.”

The report said the school board and district officials “did not establish adequate overtime controls or adopt written policies and procedures to ensure overtime was incurred only when necessary and unavoidable. They also did not ensure all overtime was preapproved and monitored."

Specifically, it said the district paid 20 employees a total of $167,034 for nonemergency overtime work, “including routine job duties and planned events, without written preapproval and did not budget for overtime separate from other payroll expenditures.”

That created a situation in which district officials “did not have adequate information to properly monitor the overtime budget and expenditures.”

Paul Defendini, Farmingdale’s superintendent of schools, said that while the state audits “are instrumental in helping to ensure financial controls used by municipal entities are up-to-date and make the most efficient use of taxpayer funds,” the district does “have disagreements with some of the characterizations expressed by the state’s audit.”

“Specifically, nowhere in the Comptroller’s findings does it state overtime payments were made inappropriately, which might erroneously be inferred by a cursory review of the report,” Defendini said. “Rather, the main point of the audit report is simply that the district should use more formal, written pre-authorization procedures and protocols to more accurately track and monitor overtime payments.”

The comptroller’s office made the following recommendations:

• Adopt a policy with clear guidelines and procedures for overtime work.
• Ensure all nonemergency overtime is preapproved in writing and properly documented.
• Properly budget for and monitor overtime.

Defendini said the district welcomes the suggestions and will begin to implement them in the 2024-25 school year “as supplemental safeguards to our already established internal controls.”