Overpayment ruled an accident

The investigation into the overpayment of staff members by the Rockville Centre School District is complete, and the cause was determined to be an error in contract interpretation by someone in the business office, the Board of Education said at its meeting on Dec. 10.

Board Vice President Mayda Kramer, filling in for President Liz Dion, who was absent, read a prepared statement at the beginning of the meeting, after trustees met with their legal counsel.

“As we expected, the error was the result of a mistaken interpretation of a contract provision by the business office,” Kramer said. “We can confidently say that this is not a case of employee corruption, and no business office employee personally benefited from this error. We are working to recover the funds, and a public report will be forthcoming.”

The error resulted in the district’s overpaying 44 teachers for three years, at a cost of nearly $250,000. It was discovered in September, when a business office employee noticed something odd in some of the payroll numbers. The error was corrected before the first paychecks for the current school year were sent out.

At a previous board meeting, John H. Gross, an attorney with the district’s counsel, Ingerman Smith LLP, explained that the error occurred when someone applied contractual pay increases to the teachers twice.

Ingerman Smith conducted an investigation, and also hired a forensic accounting firm to do a detailed analysis of the district’s financial records to see if there were any other inconsistencies. Both investigations concluded that the error was an accident.

Now the district is working with the teachers union on negotiating repayment of the money to the district, but the two parties have not yet reached an agreement. Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that some of the 44 overpaid staff members have retired from the district and are technically no longer represented by the union.

Superintendent Dr. William Johnson explained that the recouped money would most likely be put back into the district’s general fund, although it is not likely to have much of an impact on the budget.

“Even though it sounds like a huge amount of money, from the point of view of the overall budget over an extended period of time, it’ll have an impact, but not a significant impact on the overall expenditure plan,” Johnson said. “We look at it from this point of view: Every small piece of revenue helps.”

Johnson said he hoped the public report of the law firm and the forensic accountant’s findings would be available sometime in January, but he wasn’t sure exactly when. “The work is done,” he said. “It’s just a matter of putting it into words and getting it out there.”