The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune News Editor

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

BPL’S latest overtime controversy has echoes stretching back more than a decade, when an internal audit of its predecessor found repeated multimillion-dollar budget overruns, employees earning more in overtime than their basic salaries and weaknesses in management oversight.

In 2012, when the utility still operated as the Bahamas Electricity Corporation, an internal audit found that overtime spending had exceeded budget projections for three consecutive years and described some cases of excessive overtime as physically difficult to justify and potentially dangerous.

The findings bear striking similarities to the questions now confronting Bahamas Power and Light after internal records showed three employees in its fuel and performance department collectively received more than $600,000 in overtime between May 2025 and April 2026.

The 2012 internal audit showed that the corporation spent $8.324m on overtime in 2010 against a budget of $6.305m, exceeding projections by just over $2m, or 32 percent.

In 2011, overtime increased to $10.462m against a budget of $8.208m, producing another $2.254m overrun.

By 2012, the overtime bill had risen to $11.835m against a budget of $8.563m, exceeding projections by $3.272m, or more than 38 percent.

The audit found that breaching overtime budgets had effectively become a recurring feature of BEC’s operations.

It also raised concerns about extremely high overtime worked by individual employees.

The audit said some cases of excessive overtime appeared “physically impossible, highly dangerous or simply questionable” when productivity and the number of hours involved were considered.

The problems extended beyond individual workers.

The audit identified deficiencies in BEC’s systems for tracking and managing overtime, including a failure over several years to properly categorise why overtime was being incurred.

It said the corporation had not clearly distinguished between overtime caused by employee absences or holidays, unpredictable emergencies and overtime that management could control.

The accounting and chief financial officer’s department had also stopped producing monthly summaries identifying escalating overtime costs and adverse budget variances by department, according to the audit.

The report called for more frequent analysis so managers could intervene before overtime costs escalated.

Family Island operations were a particularly significant contributor.

In 2012, BEC budgeted $2.569m for Family Island overtime but spent $4.709m — an overrun of $2.141m, or more than 83 percent. The Family Islands accounted for about 65 percent of BEC’s total overtime budget overrun that year.

Energy supply also exceeded its overtime allocation by almost $1m, spending $3.454m, while customer services exceeded its budget by more than 69 percent.

The controversy prompted an aggressive response from then-BEC executive chairman Leslie Miller after he took control of the corporation.

By April 2013, Mr Miller said BEC had reduced average monthly overtime spending from about $1m to less than $500,000.

He described overtime as a “serious problem” and said the corporation had been spending around $12m annually on overtime for several years.

The scale of some individual payments also attracted attention.

Mr Miller said at the time that $2.393m had been paid to just ten employees.

The then-chairman said BEC intended to reduce overtime substantially and suggested the problem had become entrenched enough that cutting it would be difficult.

Four years later, Mr Miller again pointed to overtime reductions as one of the achievements of his tenure.

Responding in 2017 to separate allegations arising from an Ernst & Young audit, he said overtime had stood at about $12m annually when his board arrived and had fallen below $6m by the time it left.

He also claimed that some employees involved in reconnecting and disconnecting customers had previously been earning as much as $97,000 a year before changes were made.