Money & Politics | Spotlight

California Watch received two datasets from the State Controller’s Office, which we used to estimate how much departments paid their employees for excess leave between 2006 and mid-2009. Go through the numbers with us.

The first dataset contained the total amount of unused leave paid out by department, which included a breakout of vacation and other types of leave payments, such as comp time, holiday pay, personal leave and other smaller leave categories. The vacation total also included something the state calls “annual leave,” which is similar to vacation but includes sick days in the same pot.

Using that dataset, we calculated the proportion of leave payments that each department paid for vacation and annual leave. For example, 66 percent of the lump-sum cash paid to state prison workers was for vacation and annual leave. That’s actually quite low: The average across all state departments was 88 percent.

We then looked at the second dataset, which contained a list of lump-sum payments to individual employees and the number of days and hours that each employee cashed out. Unlike the department totals, this dataset did not differentiate between vacation/annual leave and other categories of time off.

We were able to roughly calculate how much each employee was paid per hour on average for their payouts. That allowed us to compare the amount workers actually received to an estimate of the amount they would have received had their payouts been capped at the state limit of 640 hours, which applies to most employees.

Finally, we added up the estimated overages by department and reduced them by the proportion each department paid, on average, for vacation and annual leave as a whole. The result was about $128 million, which we rounded down to $100 million to account for other unknowns.

The estimate isn’t perfect, but we made efforts to be conservative. Beyond reducing the final figure by $28 million, our data didn’t include information from a handful of departments, including state universities.

Documents from the Department of Personnel Administration also helped substantiate the case that the overages were common. A list the department provided showed that more than 14,000 state workers had exceeded their vacation/leave caps as of December 2008. That was about 6 percent of the state workforce at the time, though furloughs have likely caused that number to rise.