Houston Police Department auditors examining two dozen of the agency’s top earners of overtime pay in 2022 found they could not fully account for how most of the officers spent their time, noting some divisions within the department weren’t following policy on how to record hours worked.
The report raises questions about financial oversight at HPD, which has faced persistent overtime overages and is projected to exceed its $1.1 billion budget for the current fiscal year – and comes as HPD’s 5,400 officers work under a new contract that guarantees them more overtime pay.
The audit, written in October 2024 but not released to the Houston Chronicle until this year, identified 26 HPD officers who earned more than $70,000 in overtime in the city’s 2022 fiscal year. Among their findings:
- Auditors could not verify some or all of the hours worked by 20 of the 26 officers because different HPD divisions recorded time worked differently and many weren’t following policy on how to record it.
- HPD divisions aren’t always sharing overtime data with each other when an officer works for a different division on an assignment.
- In at least one case, auditors found an overtime record was filed on behalf of an officer who hadn’t worked the listed time – because the document listed the wrong officer.
A Chronicle analysis found 129 officers earned more than $70,000 in overtime in at least one year from spring 2020 to spring 2025, taking home a combined $37 million during the period.
The 26 officers listed in the audit were also some of the department’s top earners in the Chronicle’s overtime analysis, collecting between $316,000 and $712,000 in overtime pay in the five years studied.
Despite the lapses identified in the 2024 report, the auditors stated they uncovered no evidence of malfeasance or fraud. But even if the problems identified in the report are limited to bad record-keeping, experts said, they put HPD at risk for serious overtime abuse.
“How can we trust their words and statements as a police agency if they can’t even account for the way they spend money?” said Brian Higgins, a retired New Jersey police chief and a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor. “If this is just sloppy record-keeping, it needs to be fixed. But if it’s anything worse, that needs to be rooted out.”
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City Controller Chris Hollins in March said his office was in the middle of an audit on HPD overtime spending, saying it was important to hold the agency accountable to taxpayers.
The police department exceeded its overtime budget by $26 million in fiscal year 2025, Hollins said, and is on pace to exceed it by $13 million in the current budget year that ends June 30.
“Despite prior efforts like staffing incentives, updated equipment and expanded contract services, costs have continued to rise,” Hollins said.
Whitmire has criticized calls for better accounting of overtime spending, most recently at a conference hosted by Bill King, a Baker Institute public policy fellow.
“Let’s call it what it is. It’s defunding police,” Whitmire said.
The mayor also negotiated new contracts with police and firefighters that will cost the city a projected $3 billion over five years. The new police contract includes language that gives officers more guaranteed overtime – a point some experts have cautioned might further increase costs.
I like to come back to that old chestnut about “running government like a business” in times like these, because I can tell you after 30+ years in Corporate America, this ain’t how businesses are run. To put it in terms that are closer to home, we’ve spent the first almost 2.5 years of the Whitmire administration auditing the hell out of the non-police and fire parts of the city’s budget. We’ve squeezed a bit of savings out of it, more from offering retirement packages than anything else, but still. We’ve optimized like nobody’s business. And yet, after all that time and knowing that it’s a big and growing expense in an increasingly constrained budget, we have no idea what’s going on with police overtime expenditures. Not because it’s overly complicated, but because we can’t seem to be bothered to look. The Mayor can call that whatever he wants. I call it poor governance.
Hollins is going to cook Whitmire’s goose come 2028 as by then he’ll have four years of facts and figures and slush/misspent funds to hammer him and campaign on.
“The police department exceeded its overtime budget by $26 million in fiscal year 2025, Hollins said, and is on pace to exceed it by $13 million in the current budget year that ends June 30.
HPD’s accounting department is monkeys f***ing a football. How do you spend $26M more than you were allocated, then do it again the following cycle ? Where is John Whitmire’s outrage ?