ON THE CLOCK: Decades-old CPD scheduling system at center of investigations

The failure of former Columbus officials to upgrade a paper system used for decades to record which Columbus police officers were working, and where, resulted in the department’s record keeping taking center stage in multiple special prosecutor investigations, two State Board of Accounts audits and allegations of ghost employment and theft.

And it all came to somewhat of a closure this week after two special prosecutors declined to file charges against 17 Columbus police officers and former police chief Jon Rohde, citing sloppy recordkeeping at the department and a lack of evidence to support allegations of official misconduct and ghost employment.

The decision not to file charges culminated a nearly two-year investigation by Indiana State Police, including investigators from the Indianapolis and Versailles posts, who spent hundreds of hours reviewing thousands of CPD and city records.

It also came nearly two years after another special prosecutor investigation resulted in criminal charges being filed against two former CPD officers, who pleaded guilty to working a second job providing security at Columbus Regional Hospital while clocked in as city police officers who later entered plea bargain agreements and received suspended sentences.

A special investigation report released in 2019 by the Indiana State Board of Accounts found the lack of “proper controls” in CPD’s paper system had “allowed the department employees to receive compensation from the city while working at Columbus Regional Hospital.”

However, upgrading the paper system — which was described by former city officials as “antiquated” and by investigators as “rife with inaccuracy” — was never a priority or even discussed for much of the 1990s and 2000s, even as WiFi, broadband internet and other advances in technology took off and became increasingly part of everyday life.

And once city officials took notice, software incompatibilities and other challenges sidetracked the effort to upgrade the system quickly.

In place for decades

The origin of the paper system, known as the personnel assignment register, or PAR system, remains somewhat unknown, according to current and former city officials and CPD officers.

Columbus Police Chief Mike Richardson said the system was in place when he joined the department in 1994, and had been in effect before he got there. Former Columbus Mayor Fred Armstrong, who was a CPD officer before getting into city politics, said a similar paper system was in place as far back as 1969.

Investigators described the system was a “time-keeping” system that allowed officers to select schedules, and then request time off or swap shifts with supervisor approval.

“A supervisor for each shift would then use a ‘schedule book’ to generate PAR sheets for the upcoming shift,” according to a report by Special Prosecuting Attorney Chris Gaal. “The sheets were printed with each officer’s daily start and end times and a supervisor collected the PAR sheets following each shift.”

In many instances, supervisors failed to update the PAR sheets to reflect trainings or last-minute scheduling changes, including swapping shifts with other officers, coming in late or leaving early or working late due to being out on a call.

Gaal said that the handwritten timekeeping system used by CPD prior to 2019 was “rife with inaccuracy” and “created at least the potential for manipulation” but ultimately determined that there was “insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt” that any of the CPD officers who were the subject of his investigation had committed criminal offenses.

“There were often reasonable explanations for overlapping hours, including training, special detail duties and other informal changes that were approved by supervisors yet not recorded accurately,” Gaal states. “…As such, the possibility of human error cannot be discounted as a reasonable explanation for overlapping hours.”

In a separate investigation regarding Rohde, special prosecutor Doug Brown of Decatur County said there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the former chief engaged in criminal conduct.

While Rohde was police chief, he worked two other jobs as a security guard at CRH and a mediator for the Indiana Office of Court Services.

Brown credited Rohde with the launch of the new CPD time keeping system on Jan. 1, 2019, saying he should be credited “for resolving the department’s time-keeping issue.”

Rohde stepped down as police chief at the end of 2019 and now serves as Bartholomew County Superior Court 2 judge.

Taken as a whole, the special prosecutor concluded of the Rohde allegations: “Poor optics, not criminal conduct.”

“I don’t like the optics of the target (Rohde) serving as an administrative officer for the Columbus Police Department while also working second and third paid positions during routine business hours of the Columbus Police Department,” Brown wrote in the report.

For their part, Richardson and City of Columbus Human Resources Director Arlette Tinsley said the system, although described by investigators as a timekeeping system, was never meant to be used for that.

The PAR system was actually a “scheduling” system for police officers in which supervisors designated which area of the city that officers were patrolling, which was passed along to 911 dispatchers so they knew which officer was being sent where, and in what part of the city, they said.

“They were not timekeeping sheets, they were schedule sheets,” Tinsley said. “Back in the day, you would work your schedule, and if you told your boss you were leaving two hours early, there wasn’t as much accountability required.”

A CPD employee would then manually enter the PAR sheets into a spreadsheet, which was sent to Clerk Treasurer’s office to process payroll, CPD officials said.

But patrol officers didn’t have access to the paper records to ensure that they accurately reflected their hours, CPD officials said. In many cases, patrol officers would have no idea if overtime was being documented. Under the old system, many officers would keep their own calendars to track overtime hours.

“It wasn’t a perfect system,” said CPD spokesman Lt. Matt Harris. “Far from it.”

Not on the radar

Upgrading CPD’s paper system never popped up on former Mayor Armstrong’s radar during his four terms in office from 1996 to 2012. Neither did ghost employment.

“I don’t recall a big problem,” Armstrong said.

“That was never brought up because (the officers) knew that if they were doing that, that’s criminal,” Armstrong added. “…You can’t steal time. So I thought guys were pretty honest. Maybe they weren’t. As far as I knew, when I was on the police department, they were dag-gone pretty honest.”

The biggest payroll issue at CPD that Armstrong recalled addressing while mayor involved compensatory time. During Armstrong’s first term, CPD was struggling to maintain enough officers on the streets because the officers had accrued a large amount of time off and were taking extended vacations.

Armstrong and the Columbus City Council decided to pay out all of the officers’ remaining comp time and set a cap for how much comp time could be kept on the books.

But after that, Armstrong said he “never heard of a problem” involving payroll or timekeeping at CPD.

“(The system was) pretty simple, it wasn’t scientific or anything,” Armstrong said. “And I thought everybody was pretty honest about it, really. It’s no big deal. Again, I don’t know, maybe somebody slipped through … but I’m sure looking back, (some) probably did.”

As a result, CPD’s decades-old paper system was still being used when former Mayor Kristen Brown took office in 2012 — when 67% of U.S. households reported having a broadband internet connection and five years after the release of the first iPhone.

In 2015, during Brown’s administration, the city purchased a scheduling system called Kronos, but it had not been installed by the time she left office in 2016, city officials said.

Brown revealed herself last week to be the individual who provided what she said was evidence against Rohde, who she hired as police chief in 2014 and later sued in a public records dispute.

A new system

In January 2016, Tinsley met with current Mayor Jim Lienhoop, an accountant and former city council member who had just taken office, and other city officials.

During the meeting, Lienhoop was told that the city “needed to address the timekeeping system in the police department” because it was “manual, antiquated and in need of replacement,” Lienhoop said.

“My directive to her was, ‘Well, we need to fix the problem and do what you can to install the system,’” Lienhoop said. “And that took several months to work through, and the conclusion at the end of a several-month trial period was that Kronos would not work.”

City officials then started looking for another system, Lienhoop said.

However, configuring a system to meet CPD’s needs was difficult, as CPD officers are required to work 160 hours within a 28-day period, which is not the same as working a 40-hour week. Some weeks might be more hours, some might be less.

But within a year, the city found a software system made by ExecuTime that they believed would work, Rohde told The Republic in 2019.

The city then went through a purchase process and spent much of 2018 working with the vendor to make the software compatible with CPD’s scheduling and pay cycles, Rohde said.

The changeover, which city officials said represented an investment of more than $1 million for the city, was championed by Rohde, Lienhoop and Richardson.

ExecuTime is an electronic, web-based platform that eliminated the paperwork and PAR forms. Each employee must manually enter their own time each day online, including start and end times and then the entry is reviewed and approved or denied by a supervisor.

The software is now in each CPD patrol car and may be accessed on each employee’s phone. It is approved by the State Board of Accounts and meets all requirements for federal law, Tinsley said.

So far, city officials say the new system is working well. An audit by the Indiana State Board of Account found that “overlapping hours at CPD and CRH diminished greatly” under the new system, Gaal stated in his report.

“Obviously, ExecuTime corrected a lot of issues and the State Board of Accounts speaks to that,” Richardson said.

ExecuTime has been rolled out to all Columbus city hall employees in addition to CPD, Tinsley said. The Columbus Parks and Recreation Department is still using a “punch-in, punch-out” time clock system and will be moving to ExecuTime soon, while the Columbus Fire Department is currently using the Kronos system, she said.

The Republic Editor Julie McClure contributed to this story.