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Yutu OT payments complete this week
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Posted on Oct 23 2019
All overtimes incurred as the CNMI recovered from the devastation of Super Typhoon Yutu in late October 2018 would be paid by the end of the week, according to Finance Secretary David Atalig.
Atalig told Saipan Tribune yesterday that his office distributed last Friday the last batch of Yutu overtime payments, which amounted to a total of $2.1 million.
However, Atalig noted that there are several government employees who have yet to be paid for overtime during the Super Typhoon Yutu recovery, and that is because his office had to hold back their checks due to discrepancies between his office’s records and the Public Assistance Office records, or the office that compiled the requests for reimbursements of overtime payments during Super Typhoon Yutu.
“We printed about $2.1 million in overtime payments. I released more than half on Friday, and I’ll release the rest this week. I held off on some because the Public Assistance Office told me we had overpayments, so we needed to reconcile those,” he told Saipan Tribune.
The problem, according to Atalig, was that the Public Assistance Office, or PAO, has not received all of the overtime sheets for reimbursements, effectively making it seem as if some people are being overpaid for their overtime.
“[The PAO] compared [the requests for reimbursements] to what we paid out, and there are…a lot of people in their records that they did not receive their time sheets [for reimbursement], so it looks like an overpayment,” he said.
“Those that were identified as overpayment, I held those checks just so that I can get a final review this week, and then I would be releasing those by the end of the week,” he said.
According to Atalig, the total amount of overtime costs for Super Typhoon Yutu recovery amounted to $13 million. His office released in early October 2019 about $1.5 million, while over half of the remaining $2.1 million was released last week and the remaining $9.4 million had already been distributed.
