The city of Atlanta’s process for hiring extra employees during staff shortages or transitional periods is shabbily overseen, with departments often overspending on temporary workers, a new city audit found.
The audit found that city’s “extra help” policies “lack detailed guidance, resulting in inconsistent practices,” performance auditor Ijegayehu Jones told City Council members during a presentation Wednesday.
City departments can hire people in extra help jobs to fill staffing gaps during emergencies, busy times or other transitional periods. As of last November, about 440 people were on the city’s payroll in extra help roles — accounting for about 5% of the city’s work force.
Per the city’s policy, these jobs are meant to be temporary, not lasting more than a year. The audit found about 17% of extra help employees had been in their positions longer than one year, with one employee serving in an “extra help” role for about nine years.
“Anything from five years or over seems a little bit eye-popping to me,” Councilman Alex Wan said after the presentation, asking for answers on why some people have been in those jobs for so long.
“I mean, there’s no real explanation other than, nobody’s monitoring,” City Auditor Amanda Noble responded.
The existing policy hasn’t been revised since 2007. Extra help positions are subject to less oversight than the city’s formal human resources procedures for full-time employees, the audit found.
Over the past three fiscal years, the amount spent on extra labor exceeded the amount budgeted for those employees, according to the audit. The annual budget deficits ranged from $6.6 to $10.2 million.
The findings come as Mayor Andre Dickens searches for a replacement for current Human Resources Commissioner Jeffrey Norman, with the city hoping to beef up its staffing numbers amid a difficult labor market.
Auditors made a number of recommendations to the city’s HR department to update the extra help policy, better track such positions and create a process to monitor how long they are filled.
“We have already started the work that is needed to make sure we have full implementation of those recommendations,” Norman told the council.
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