PARIS — Oxford County continues to grapple with payroll inconsistencies almost eight months since commissioners implemented new policies aimed at ensuring more accountability from employees and supervisors.

At a department head meeting last week, county Treasurer Roy Gedat said payroll issues largely cleared up after the new policies were implemented last September, but slowly reappeared.

One outcome was the creation of weekly “exception reports” generated by the Treasurer’s Office to record problems with time sheets submitted by employees.

Despite generating the reports, there does not seem to be any consequences for county employees that consistently submit inaccurate time sheets or don’t turn in time sheets at all, Gedat said.

Employees may not even know that exceptions are being recorded on the time sheets they submit, said Deputy county Administrator Judy Haas, noting that she and county Administrator Scott Cole only began to receive the reports in the last month.

Employees that don’t turn in time sheets are paid their regular hourly wage, according to county policy, Deputy Treasurer Debra Martin said. No policy, however, address what happens if the time sheets are consistently missing, she noted.

Commissioner David Duguay said there needed to be consequences for employees who had ongoing issues with their time sheets.

“You get so many strikes and you’re out,” Duguay said. “If we get the same employee coming up with the same exception week after week, or two out of every three weeks, there needs to be consequences.”

Commissioners need to work more closely with department heads to make them aware of the exceptions and help fix the problems, Duguay said.

According to the exception reports provided by the Treasurer’s Office, there were 38 exceptions recorded in the first three pay periods in April. Employee names were redacted from the reports to protect privacy.

A minority of the time sheets submitted by the county’s 80-plus employees had problems.

Missing time sheets account for 17 of the exceptions, nearly half of the total. Five of the missing reports were either turned in late or signed off by a supervisor, according to the reports.

A review of exception reports since the beginning of the year show that other common inconsistencies include time sheets that are miscalculated or unsigned by supervisors. Another common issue is failing to take mandatory lunch breaks in contravention of county policy, Gedat said.

Register of Probate Jennifer Dilworth, whose office frequently records missing lunch breaks according to the exception reports, said it was difficult for employees to avoid working through lunch during busy Probate Court days.

According to Gedat, the Treasurer’s Office works with department supervisors to clarify and fix most of the problems when they are identified, Gedat said, but the fact that inconsistencies continue every week doesn’t bode well for the planned implementation of an electronic timekeeping system.

“If we’re ever going to get to the point when we have electronic timekeeping and everyone is responsible for their own time sheets and supervisors are going to be responsible for monitoring it, we’ve really got to get the paper thing down first,” Gedat told commissioners.

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