More than 300 New York City government employees more than doubled their pay with overtime during the city’s 2017 fiscal year, according to the latest payroll data added to SeeThroughNY, the Empire Center’s transparency website.
Of the 313 earning more in overtime than in base pay, 134 worked for the Department of Correction, and 41 worked for the Administration for Children’s Services. In fiscal 2016, a total of 307 city employees doubled their pay with overtime.
The city’s OT champ last year was Fintan O’Donoghue, a senior stationary engineer in the Department of Correction who collected $191,488 for a total city paycheck of $344,771. A total of 153 employees were paid over $100,000 in overtime; among them, 96 worked for the Department of Correction.
The overtime counts do not include payments to undercover law enforcement officers. The Empire Center has sued the city Office of Payroll Administration for access to amounts paid to those individuals on an anonymous, identity-protected basis.
Tim Hoefer, executive director of the Empire Center, credited Mayor Bill de Blasio for the city’s new practice of posting its annual payroll on the internet for public review. Data can be found at opendata.cityofnewyork.us.
“New York City is setting a good example that state government, local governments and school districts can learn from,” said Hoefer, “When we first posted public payrolls on SeeThroughNY nine years ago, we aimed to show elected officials what they should be doing on their own. New York City, which has one of the biggest and most complicated payrolls in the state, is showing that this can and should be done.”
The Empire Center will continue collecting and posting data to SeeThroughNY, the state’s only independent, comprehensive database of public spending records.
The Empire Center, based in Albany, is an independent, not-for-profit, non-partisan think tank dedicated to promoting policies that can make New York a better place to live, work and do business.
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