No, I haven’t overlooked this little story due to Bonusgate.

Emanuel is an inspector for Houston Police Department’s Neighborhood Protection.

“His supervisors have told me they’re conducting an inquiry,” said Lt. Robert Manzo, HPD.

11 News discovered the city is not collecting hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars from employees who make personal calls on their city cell phones.

It’s just that there’s really not much to add. Ten years ago, if/when I made long distance calls on a city phone, I would receive a report a few months later. It was my responsibiltiy to mark off any calls that were personal business and attach a check to reimburse the City of Houston. Although city policy was and remains that you don’t make personal calls from city phones, sometimes there really isn’t any choice; you’re disputing a credit card bill and the company can only be contacted during regular business hours, or you’ve got to talk to an insurance company, but it’s not toll free, etc. Managers understand that life stubbornly refuses to be lived between the lines, and as long as our work got done and we reimbursed the city, everything was ok.

But the explosion in electronic devices has coincided with the reduction of the city payroll. Cell phone companies apparently don’t submit their details electronically; and even if they do, someone (in F&A) has got to spend hours manually poring over the records for each phone, creating reports based on those bills, and sending those reports to the appropriate Department, which then has to split them out by division, branch, office, and finally to the supervisors of employee who has the phone. With the city’s great love of paper (as opposed to electronic) records, and signatures on everything, this is a hideously time-consuming process. We just don’t have the people to track these things routinely anymore.

It’s too expensive, HPD says, to print individual statements, and ask employees to pay back personal calls.

Eventually, it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis: Which saves more money, oversight or ignoring the problem? Obviously, at the time the decision was made, ignoring it seemed to be the better decision. But with lack of oversight, the problem has mushroomed out of control; it’s likely that oversight will be cheaper for a while. So, something else gets set aside, and employee(s) get tasked with auditing the bills. In the long run though, some manager is going to look at the hours and hours that an employee is spending pushing paper around, examining phone records. They’ll look at the backlog of other work that needs doing, the lack of reimbursement (because everyone’s now following the rules), and decide that, maybe, the phone records can be deferred “for a few weeks” until something else is caught up. A few weeks will become a few months, then a few years, and we’ll be right back here again.

Like most big organiztions, the city has a problem with trimming payroll without trimming the work (or increasing the automation to decrease the workload). And employees that spend 5k minutes a month talking to their girlfriend are one result.

Edit: BlogHouston is also on the story.