By Missy Wilkinson
The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate
NEW ORLEANS — Inconsistent oversight of overtime hours and inadequate budgeting by the New Orleans Police Department and the city created an environment ripe for payroll fraud over the first half of 2025, the city’s Office of the Inspector General said Thursday.
Inspector General Ed Michel warned the problem will persist without stronger guardrails. He outlined recommendations that NOPD on Thursday says the department welcomes.
“It is critical that the NOPD and the City properly manage its overtime usage, including uniform methods of oversight and verification of overtime throughout the Department,” Michel said in a statement. “Otherwise, future overtime budget planning and accountability will be ineffective.”
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Michel’s office reviewed the NOPD’s overtime use and practices for the first seven months of 2025, when officers logged more than 260,000 overtime hours costing $16.5 million, the OIG wrote in a letter to NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick
Extraordinary pressures bookended that period: A terrorist attack in the wee hours of Jan. 1, a snowstorm that required unanticipated overtime, and a looming budget crisis at year’s end that revealed a $160 million shortfall.
A $125 million bridge loan secured from emergency bond sales was approved by state officials late last year to cover the budget gap, a strategy spearheaded by Mayor Helena Moreno prior to her inauguration this week. Moreno’s administration did not respond to a request for additional comment Wednesday.
About $50 million of the shortfall was tied to NOPD overtime that the city failed to fund for 2025.
The NOPD did not submit overtime budget reports to City Hall as required, arguing it had no overtime budget, the OIG said. The NOPD on Thursday said that has changed with the new administration.
“In 2025, the City did not allocate a designated overtime line for NOPD, which made long-term planning and oversight more difficult,” said NOPD director of communications Officer Reese Harper in a statement.
“With a clear overtime budget now in place, thanks to Mayor Moreno and the City Council , we have defined guidelines and structure to manage overtime the right way.”
Michel’s office found that discretionary “Code 25" overtime — a weekly allotment of 120 hours per district — didn’t track operational need, as workloads varied widely, Michel wrote.
Officers in the Second District, which covers Uptown, handled roughly a third fewer calls than those in the Seventh District, the city’s largest, encompassing New Orleans East, according to an analysis of NOPD calls for service.
Evidence of NOPD officers working past time caps, double-dipping with off-duty details or committing blatant timesheet fraud has grown in recent years, spurred by extensive research by Skip Gallagher, a UNO instructor who has tracked the hours and pay of scores of cops.
Allegations of widespread timesheet fraud within the city’s police force sparked a federal probe, multiple arrests and, in the case of former mayor LaToya Cantrell and her former police officer bodyguard Jeffrey Vappie, a federal fraud indictment.
Michel found that no well-defined oversight existed to track if officers actually showed up for overtime shifts. Whether supervisors used tools such as GPS data, body cameras and biometric clocks was “unclear,” the OIG said.
“Evaluators found there was no consistent process used by supervisors across NOPD districts to verify that officers worked the overtime hours they claimed,” Michel wrote in the letter.
Gallagher said the problem has only worsened since he began investigating in 2021.
“For years I have been identifying officers engaged in payroll fraud, and yet the problem has continued with only minor changes within the NOPD,” he said.
Michel’s suggestions for reform included budgeting realistically; allocating discretionary overtime based on operational need; using existing technology to verify overtime work; and increasing transparency by publishing overtime data through a public dashboard.
NOPD said they appreciated Michel’s recommendations and review of their overtime practices.
“NOPD will be a responsible steward of public dollars, strengthening oversight, documentation and accountability while continuing to meet the public safety demands of New Orleans,” Harper said.
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