The Tribune

BY NEIL HARTNELL

TRIBUNE Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A FORMER Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) chief executive yesterday said he was “shocked” by overtime figures he branded “off the charts” as it emerged that such payments have previously equalled almost one-third of the state-owned utility’s regular payroll.

Whitney Heastie, who headed BPL management under the Minnis government before stepping down in 2022, told Tribune Business that his executive team had “worked” to reduce BPL’s overtime bill by devolving responsibility for managing how many extra hours were worked, by whom and how much they were paid to individual department heads and managers.

This, he explained, allowed senior BPL executives to “drill down” at “the ground level” to detect where significant overtime was being incurred, as those employees and departments receiving significant extra hours and payment would then “float to the top of the spread sheet” senior managers received monthly.

But, speaking after the Bahamas Electrical Workers Union (BEWU) threatened industrial action over BPL’s planned overtime policy changes, following revelations that just three workers in one department collected more than $600,000 in overtime between them in 2025, Mr Heastie told this newspaper that a union ‘work to rule’ should “never come into play” on this issue as overtime is not an entitlement nor guaranteed.

Meanwhile, well-placed Tribune Business sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that overtime has long been a “huge, huge, huge” issue at BPL. They revealed that an internal audit, conducted under the Minnis administration, found that the state-owned energy monopoly’s monthly overtime payments averaged between 27-32 percent of its regular base salary payments.

This, they added, was more than double the global electricity industry’s average where overtime payments were typically equal to 12 percent of base pay. Given that BPL’s monthly payroll at the time was around $4.5m, this meant that overtime payments were averaging between $1.215m and $1.44m per month. On an annual basis, this translated into between $14.58m and $17.28m in incurred overtime costs - a sum close to the near-$20m that the Davis administration cited yesterday.

“They found out that, every single month, 27-32 percent of base pay was paid out in additional overtime,” one source said. “It was definitely close to 30 percent. The industry average was around 12 percent. Transmission and distribution accounted for the bulk, but that was high. That survey really opened eyes, and they made a plan to move towards industry standard numbers.”

The source explained that, because BPL at the time needed to “get its financial house in order” as part of preparations for the subsequently-aborted $650m rate reduction bond (RRB) refinancing, the then-Board and management initiated a plan to reduce overtime through the introduction of “best practices and metrics” in all departments.

The goal, given the sensitivities of BPL’s union’s was to reduce the overtime bill as a percentage of base pay gradually over time. While this plan was initiated under the Minnis administration, it is unclear whether it was ever continued and followed through on by BPL Boards and management under the first, and now second, Davis administration.

However, it appears that yet another overtime study was initiated given the details concerning the three employees receiving more than $600,000 in collective overtime payments. The three, all staff in the fuel and performance department, received a combined $601,295.16 in overtime between May 2025 and April 2026.

Two accounted for $483,281.53 of the total, receiving $265,551.83 and $217,729.70 respectively, while the third received $118,013.63. Payroll information lists the annual base salaries of the two highest overtime earners as approximately $78,388 and $56,182 respectively. Their overtime payments were therefore more than three times their annual base salaries.

Mr Heastie told Tribune Business yesterday: “I was just shocked at the numbers. It’s off the charts quite frankly. The question in my mind is why; what’s driving that? Is it, in fact, all legitimate, and where are the people who are managing this; where are they in the process? You cannot send something off to payroll without a minimum of a manager and/or director’s signature at least when I was there.”

Other sources familiar with BPL’s workings, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the three overtime recipients are being unfairly demonised because management must have signed-off on the hours worked and payments made.

“Everybody’s missing the point,” one said. “If they are making this overtime, it goes through three tiers. It’s on the computer; a manager puts it in. It’s sent to a manager, who signs off on it, and a director who also signs-off. Obviously it’s been approved because they’ve been paid. The process is working.”

Another even suggested that the revelation of the overtime records may backfire on BPL and the Government because it exposes that, during this period, the utility was relying heavily on the more expensive automated diesel oil (ADO) rather than heavy fuel oil. The three workers cited incurred overtime for work involving fuel transfers, tankers, pumping fuel and other assignments.

Individual overtime claim sheets include numerous entries involving fuel transfers between facilities, ocean and fuel tankers, and work on projects. In some months, individual employees received more than $20,000 in overtime.

Mr Heastie, recalling that BPL’s overtime bill was initially an issue when he took office, said: “We worked to get it down. One of the things we did was make sure overtime was managed at the department level so the executives responsible had to make sure their managers were in control of overtime.

“The way we managed that, every month once payroll was run, we’d get an overtime report. That report was divided up into departments so the executives could zone in on every one and managers from that department.” Mr Heastie said this was done to hold all BPL departments and their managers accountable, with the goal being to reduce overtime to between 5-10 percent of each unit’s budget.

“Overtime is very difficult to manage at a high level,” he explained. “We had to get it down to where overtime was actually incurred, and the managers were more in tune with the different operations. I think we had it well under control. We had a target of 5-10 percent of the overall department’s budget for what we expected [to spend on overtime] on a monthly basis, and to try and manage it from that perspective.

“Those that tended to have high overtime, and it was managed at the individual level, they would float to the top of the spread sheet and we’d ask the question as to why those persons were working ‘x’ hours of overtime. It was like we’d have a particular person or group of persons floating to the top, and that would give us an indication of what was driving overtime and what we needed to do to get the numbers down to get it in range.

“It was not managing from on high. It was managing from the ground level, so we could get our arms around it. Generally it was not an issue once we figured out how to get down to the grass roots level to understand what’s driving it, who’s earning it and why it’s needed so we can drill down into why we’re having this overtime. Until you really understand what’s driving it, there’s no work around to fix the issue.”

As an example, Mr Heastie said that during his time at BPL it was realised that significant overtime was being created through having to deal with the “sludge” waste caused by the use of heavy fuel oil (HFO). He explained that automated processes were introduced to replace, human and manual intensive ones, which brought the overtime bill down.

Mr Heastie added that the highest overtime bills were inevitably incurred in summer, due to the peak demand that often causes equipment to fail. This, he added, requires “all hands on deck to get it back in order”. However, he disagreed with the BPL line staff union’s threatened ‘work to rule’, pointing out that overtime is never “guaranteed” but a response to situations and circumstances that need urgent solutions.

Acknowledging that it was only natural that some employees, who may have been “freely” working overtime and enjoying a significant earnings boost, may push back against BPL’s latest bid to slash these costs, Mr Heastie added: “The idea of ‘work to rule’ should never come into play with overtime. It’s not something you’re entitled to. It’s based on the need of the company for instant work.”

Concerns over excessive overtime payments at BPL, and its Bahamas Electricity Corporation parent, are nothing new as Tribune Business records show these date back almost two decades.

This newspaper reported that 210,000 staff overtime hours - equivalent to one hour of overtime per day for every employee - were booked at BEC during its 2009 financial year, according to a confidential report for the Government.

Describing this level of overtime as "questionable", the study by German consultants, Fichtner, which was called ‘Strengthening the energy sector in The Bahamas’ and conducted as part of an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) funded project, noted that during BEC's 2008 financial year the amount of booked overtime hours was "double" the 2009 total - meaning there were more than 400,000 incurred that year.

The overtime issue has thus vexed successive administrations and BPL Boards/management teams dating back to the last Christie and Ingraham administrations. Leslie Miller, then then-BEC executive chairman, said in April 2013 that he had slashed the overtime bill by $1m per month - from an average of $1.5m to $500,000.

“You all have heard me talk a lot about the overtime situation at BEC, which used to be to the tune of $12m per annum for the last several years,” Mr Miller said. “We are reducing that as much as we can. I think we are now down to less than half a million dollars per month, where it was up to a million a month – and in one case it went to $1.5m a month in overtime.”

Calling the overtime situation at BEC “a serious problem,” he added: “As I said in Parliament, people go to jail for thieving but BEC, they call it overtime.” Workers were then said to be sometimes receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime pay, which former prime minister Perry Christie criticised as excessive when he spoke of plans to hire more workers to “share responsibilities” for the overtime needs.

Mr Miller spoke out then after an internal audit into BEC overtime pay up to September 30, 2012, revealed that it totalled more than $11.8m for the year. That was an increase of 13.4 per cent over the previous year, with overtime paid to 49 employees ranging from 75 per cent to 100 per cent of their basic pay.

The total amount of staff receiving overtime pay was 876, with some taking home more than $100,000 annually when this was added to their basic pay.

The internal audit report said the amount of overtime was “physically impossible, highly dangerous or simply questionable when one considers the law of diminishing marginal productivity”.

It added: “There seems to be no consequences for management failures to manage overtime and the effort to reconsidering hiring additional staff to curtail the excessive overtime worked.”