Yet another link in the bizarre Bonusgate scandal has surfaced.

Employees in the Office of Mayor Pro Tem were warned twice about budget overruns in the months leading up to the revelations about the payroll-padding scandal, the city’s top finance official said today.

“We had provided to the Mayor Pro Tem’s office some projections that they were likely to overspend their budget,” Finance and Administration Director Judy Gray Johnson told City Council’s fiscal affairs committee.

“I wish now we had been more clear on some of that.”

Her answer came in response to Councilman M.J. Khan, who questioned why someone at the city didn’t raise red flags about the spending.

Johnson, who has declined comment about the $143,000 in improper bonuses received by four employees in the office since late 2004, told the committee that her department sent them notices in November and January.

The first, she said, warned that the pro tem office was spending more than it had budgeted for salaries, and the second said the office was projected to overrun its overall $326,000 allotment.

This happened even though the office budget had increased by $66,000, about 25 percent, over the previous fiscal year.

Despite the warnings, the pro tem employees received more than $30,000 in bonuses during that three-month period, city payroll records show.

The inability of the Payroll office to put two and two together is just stunning. Not to mention the fact that apparently, none of these warnings were sent to the person ultimately responsible for the office: Carol Alvarado.

Or were they?

(Edit — from KHOU via BlogHouston:

Also Tuesday, finance officials with Mayor White’s office said they had warned Mayor Pro Tem Carol Alvarado months ago that her office was spending too much money.

But Alvarado said she never got the warnings.

When asked if this was more evidence that she should have kept a closer eye on her budget, she got testy.

“We’ve been through all this, I’m not answering any more questions about that. I answered these questions when this first happened, so I’m not going there,” she said.

As Anne says: “Maybe Rosie Hernandez intercepted the warnings. She seems to have done everything else in that office.“)

I’d really like to see these warnings. Were they written memos, or e-mails? And were they sent to the office? I doubt that seriously — they were sent to a person. Which person? Alvarado, or Hernandez? I think that if the warnings were not sent to Alvarado, she’d be making hay out of that, or at lease have been dumb enough to mention it. Perhaps she hired Rusty in time for him to point out that it would make her look even more incompetent. Or it could mean that she doesn’t want to alienate Mayor White by criticizing one of his appointees for not informing her directly. After all, his is the hand that may restore her to her “temporarily” set-aside office.

Regardless, I am unsurprised to hear that the Office of Inspector General’s report found no evidence of anything wrong in F&A. Because that would splash directly on the mayor, instead of Ms. Alvarado. After all, the OIG exists to ensure that we get to the bottom of wrongdoing in the city, which is why it doesn’t report to any department head, it reports directly to the Mayor.

Oh, wait a minute. . . . That’s what they call “conflict of interest” isn’t it?

Darn.