Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz announced today the release of a Management Advisory Memorandum to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) analyzing the BOP’s overtime hours and costs for fiscal year (FY) 2019.
In FY 2019, BOP employees worked 6.71 million overtime hours, at a cost of $300.9 million. In this informational report, the DOJ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) describes trends, anomalies, and the results of certain OIG analysis. Overall, our analysis shows that overtime is not uniform across BOP; rather, a small percentage of employees and locations account for a large percentage of the agency’s overtime. For example, most employees who used overtime charged between 80 and 520 overtime hours, but 14 percent of BOP employees who claimed overtime hours accounted for 50 percent of total overtime hours. We also found that correctional officers incurred 69 percent of overtime costs, indicating that staffing concerns are particularly acute for correctional officer positions. Finally, we found that overtime was not substantially different in urban or rural locations, and that BOP’s six geographic regions incurred overtime roughly proportional to the workforce in each region, but that 19 locations made up just over 50 percent of total overtime hours and only 36 percent of the total workforce.
This memorandum contains no recommendations to BOP. However, we believe this information can assist BOP in its efforts to understand its use of overtime, strategically address staffing challenges, and enhance its operations. BOP opted not to provide a written response to accompany the public release of this memorandum.
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