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*. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency	17-P-0410
\ Office of Inspector General	September 27,2017
. .. At a Glance
Why We Did This Audit
The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA),
Office of Inspector General
(OIG), received a hotline
complaint and initiated an audit
to determine whether the
agency's Protective Service
Detail (PSD) has adequate
controls for the scheduling,
approving and monitoring of
employees' time.
PSD agents provide physical
protection services for the EPA
Administrator. As law
enforcement officers,
PSD agents may receive
adjustments over their regular
salary, including overtime,
night-differential and law
enforcement availability pay.
However, PSD salaries are
subject to both biweekly and
annual pay caps, regardless of
the hours worked.
The purpose of this
management alert is to notify
the agency of a finding—a
control weakness that resulted
in an unauthorized payment—
while our audit continues.
Management Alert: Controls Failed to Prevent Employee
From Receiving Payment in Excess of Statutory Limit
Our audit identified an
unauthorized pay
adjustment of $23,413
for a PSD agent.
What We Found
Internal controls failed to prevent an unauthorized
overpayment to a PSD agent, causing the agent's
2016 salary to exceed the annual statutory pay cap.
The agent's biweekly pay for the period ending
January 7, 2017, included an adjustment of $23,413.
According to the agent, the additional payment was for work hours not
compensated in 2016. The agent believed that payment for these hours was not
issued in 2016 because of the biweekly pay cap. However, starting in May 2016,
the EPA authorized a series of waivers that lifted the biweekly caps, including
one waiver that retroactively applied to the pay periods from September 6, 2015,
through April 30, 2016.
On January 18, 2017, the agent informed staff in the Office of Criminal
Enforcement, Forensics and Training of this payment, expressing concern that
the annual pay cap may be exceeded. The staff notified the Office of the Chief
Financial Officer's Human Resources and Payroll Customer Service Help Desk,
which subsequently referred the issue to the EPA's payroll provider, the
Department of the Interior's Interior Business Center (IBC).
Neither the EPA nor the IBC could provide the OIG with an explanation for this
unauthorized payment until July 2017. In July 2017, the IBC told us that the
$23,413 payment was for hours that were worked by the agent in 2016 but that
could not be paid in 2016. The IBC could not process these hours until January
2017, when the EPA submitted an amended time-and-attendance file. As a
result, because the payment was not processed until the next calendar year, the
IBC's payroll system did not detect that the agent exceeded the 2016 annual pay
cap. If not for the actions of the agent, this overpayment may have remained
undetected.
This report addresses the
following:
• Compliance with the law.
According to the IBC, this payment was unauthorized and a debt collection notice
was issued to the agent on July 14, 2017.
Recommendations and Planned Agency Corrective Actions
Send all inquiries to our public
affairs office at (202) 566-2391
or visit www.epa.aov/oia.
We recommend that the EPA's Chief Financial Officer design and implement new
controls to prevent the reoccurrence of unauthorized payments. We also
recommend that the Chief Financial Officer determine whether similar
unauthorized payments have been made to other EPA employees and recover
any overpayments. The agency did not provide any proposed corrective actions;
therefore, all recommendations are unresolved.
Listing of OIG reports.

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