Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation

Selected Payroll Practices at the Long Island Region

The Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (OPRHP) has eleven regional offices. The Long Island regional office, which oversees 32 State parks and other facilities, employs about 500 year-round staff and more than 1,800 seasonal staff. We examined the regional office’s payroll-related practices and found improvements were needed to ensure employees were paid only for time actually worked. For example, seasonal employees and their supervisors were not always required to sign the employees’ official time records, thus increasing the risk such records could be inaccurate or that the time worked was not authorized. In addition, while the regional office performed periodic unannounced observations at its work locations to determine whether employees were on duty as scheduled, the office did not always adequately follow up on the employees who could not be accounted for during these observations. We recommended certain actions be taken by the regional office to strengthen its controls over payroll-related practices.

For a complete copy of Report 2007-S-89 click here.
For a copy of the 90-day response click here.
For a copy of the associated follow-up report click here.