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Times Staff WriterHillsborough County Attorney Emmy Acton may have to pay back that amount for taking more leave than she was due.
TAMPA - Hillsborough County Attorney Emmy Acton may have to pay back nearly $5,900 for taking more sick leave over the past nine months than she had coming.
Since August, Acton has failed to report 192 hours - or nearly five weeks - of sick leave, according to a review concluded Monday by her staff.
The uncounted hours would overdraw her sick leave account by 74 hours, Hillsborough Clerk of the Circuit Court records show.
Acton, who suffers from the effects of diabetes, said Monday she would do what was necessary to correct the problem.
"If I lose money, so be it," she said.
"This, to the best of my ability, is a valid correction of all the times I should have been docked."
Also Monday, Acton issued a two-page letter of apology to her staff for concerns that staff members have raised in a series of anonymous complaints and surveys in the past two weeks about how she treats rank-and-file workers.
Since the first complaints arrived, Acton's office has sent four batches of her leave corrections to the clerk's office, which handles county payroll.
Her office review also showed that Acton failed to report five vacation days. But with 159 hours of vacation time available, she has more than enough to cover the lapse. She took the vacation time mainly to visit prospective college campuses with her twin sons.Acton said the failure to report days off resulted from one of her aides giving her credit for doing work from home or out of town when she was either sick or on vacation. But she put the blame on herself.
She said she did do some business - from typing memos to participating in conference calls - on the days in question, but should not have been given credit for working.
Under a policy she implemented April 21, the leave-reporting duties have been shifted to her office accountant. However, the policy makes clear that the accuracy of Acton's time-off record is her own responsibility.
Acton is paid $165,526 a year, about $80 an hour.
In her contract with the county, Acton may be dismissed because of disability if she misses work for four successive weeks, or 20 days over a 30-day period. The language was adopted from the contract of Acton's predecessor, Fred Karl, who was battling Parkinson's disease.
He said he is in the process of hiring a consultant to investigate a "broad-ranging series of allegations of impropriety" in Acton's office.
Allegations that Acton had failed to report leave time were first included in an anonymous complaint sent to news media, near the time the new policy was enacted. The complaint was among the first of a series of anonymous letters to commissioners and others generally alleging hostile working conditions in Acton's office. Acton said she wrote the letter Monday so that her staff could hear from her directly rather than through ongoing news accounts.