Sacramento – It wasn’t a well-documented job last year when California oversaw dentist George Souhu and oversees $1.2 million. It wasn’t for a holiday.

Soohoo joined the rare Club of State employee billionaires, earning thousands of hours of unused leave when he retired, setting a new record of payments. He has broken through the list of nearly 1,000 workers who left state service with more than $100,000 in bank leave benefits, an analysis of the state’s pay record found in the Los Angeles Times. In all, California paid $413 million to workers who died last year on unused leave.

That’s nothing compared to the massive financial liability the state is facing for bank holidays in a book that surprises the government’s watchdog group yet.

“I’m more disturbed than amazed,” said John Moulach, a former Republican senator in Orange County and the current director of the Center for Public Accountability at the California Center for Policy Center, a conservative think tank. “This will be a serious problem in the future.”

The state’s unsubscribed liability for other leave benefits paid to current employees, which rose to $5.6 billion in 2023, according to the latest financial accounting report issued by the state’s management office. This has increased nearly 45% since 2019, with fewer workers taking days off as Covid-19 cut travel and temporary work policies reduced. Over the past six years, the number of retirees has increased to 73 employees, nearly five times the number of retirees paid at least $250,000 in bank leave hours.

The rising liability stems from the failure to enforce a policy that reduces the holidays for up to six weeks a year, 11 state holidays, and generous out-of-hours provisions for state employees, including personal and professional development days, and policies that reduce the vacation balance for most employees in 640 hours.

The amount of unused leave will be made public when employees are paid after leaving state services, but the controller’s office did not provide current employees with book leave numbers, saying the information was confidential. However, the controller’s office provided a total of unused leave by the department for those using the state’s vacation accounting system. That includes most of the state agencies. It does not include legislative employees or local governments.

According to data, state employees left 110 million hours of books as of December, with 40 million of those left sick and educational leave hours that cannot be cashed out when workers leave or resign from state employment. However, these unused hours can be converted to service credits to increase government pensions.

Of the state agencies, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is the most vacationing in 22 million hours of books, according to records from the Controller’s office.

“There’s nothing comparable in the private sector,” said Howard Jarvis taxpayer John Coopal. “Obviously this is a problem.”

Teresa Adams, an advisor to the Human Resources Association for Trade Organizations, said many employees in the private sector are not using all of their leave and probably don’t want to burden their colleagues or believe it will increase job security. But there is usually no financial incentive to do so, she said, as many employers have a cap on how much time they can earn.

Last year, 10 employees who received California’s biggest leave payments brought home a total of $5.3 million. For those retirees, the amount of time paid was equivalent to taking leave for more than a year. Pay records show that last year’s $578,000 leave payment was worth a three-year salary for the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, in the case of the Department of Kirk Burnett, chief Kirk Burnett, California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention. Barnett, who worked for Cal Fire for 30 years, was unable to contact us for comment.

Prison psychologist Victor Jordan retired in 2023, with unused vacation hours of over $530,000, and was paid the highest amount that year. The payment was 2.8 times his salary.

Jordan said he worked 24 hours a day at a California facility for Chino men, particularly during the pandemic, but his balance of leave has grown steadily over the 30 years with the state. He said by the time he cashed out his unused leave, he was still on break from his 1992 cost-cutting plan, which balances the state’s budget by reducing his salary in exchange for more breaks.

“I had 30 years of sitting in books,” he said. “For me, it was a perk. … a profitable state job, so I was there. I had jobs for better money, but I wanted to retire. [vacation] Cash out. ”

Jordan once said he was disciplined to book long vacations, but most of the time he didn’t take much time off as he provided important services to inmates. He said he didn’t stop his phone from ringing during his career, including during the night.

“I went there and I was really grateful for the benefits, so I dealt with it,” said Jordan, who now lives in Nevada.

He knew there was a lot of his unused vacation, but estimated that would be around $220,000. He said he still couldn’t believe how much it was totaled despite the high taxes he had to pay with a lump check.

“I didn’t know it would grow that big,” he said. “It was shocking.”

When retired employees leave, it’s not just the time they have in the book that is part of their payment calculations. They will also be paid for the extra time they should have earned if they had taken a break instead. For example, employees with 640 hours of leave will be paid for the additional leave and leave they would have earned if they had taken 80 days off.

Each hour of leave is paid based on the employee’s final salary. This is not something you earn when time arises.

Mike Genest, who served as budget director for former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, said that when he left the state service, the leave time earned as a newly hired employee who earned around $17,000 means that he was paid based on his 2009 final salary of $175,000.

Genest said the current system is “financially irresponsible” but is attempting to overhaul the way you earn or pay your leave. Change will need to negotiate with the state’s strong, deep public unions, one of the best donors to Democrats and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“That’s theoretically possible, not politically possible,” he said.

Genest said he retired in 2009 with $37,000 for unused vacation hours.

“I was in a prominent position that was difficult to take leave,” he said.

But he said the price tag for today’s stockpiled vacation is simply unsustainable. If a retired employee decides to burn off their leave before resigning from state services instead, they will receive their salary, including raising union negotiations during that time, and the additional hours will be counted on their pension.

“This should not happen,” Genest said. “It’s a bad budgeting. It’s a bad practice.”

In New York, state employees can take up to 40 days of leave, and once retired, payments for unused hours can be kept to 30 days. According to the annual financial report, the state’s estimated liability for unused leave was $1.1 billion as of March 2024.

Texas state workers are also limited on the time they can carry over from one fiscal year to the next, and unused leave will be converted to the day of illness. According to Texas law, the maximum leave for people with state services for 35 years or more is 532 hours and 66.5 days for people working in eight-hour shifts. The liability for book leave for current employees is $1.2 billion, according to the state’s annual financial report.

Banking times in California could result in budget breaks in the recession. Legally mandatory payments for unused leave will not be suspended, and instead will take a blow to reduce the state department’s budget. Under state law, if leave or other earning time arises, it is considered compensation and must be used or cashed when an employee leaves, according to the California Department of Labor and Management Affairs.

“Balance is worth it and it’s in our minds because it increases over time,” said Elana Ortega, director of human resources in California. “So we’re thinking about it from the perspective of financial responsibility that will continue to increase each year as compensation increases.”

For example, Suhu, a prison-supervised dentist, paid $1.2 million on unused leave, and after last year’s pay bump, his lump payments increased by about $55,000. Suhu, who was not contacted for comment, retired in March on a state and 30 years later on a pension of $263,000.

Ortega said that during the pandemic, workers, and other parts of the United States, were unable to travel easily due to holidays. At the same time, the state balances the 2020 budget shortage by reducing employee salaries in exchange for two days of personal leave a month.

The office of nonpartisan legislative analysts estimated the days added at a time when people weren’t taking leave, which increased the state’s liability for unsavings on leave balances by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Some departments offer the opportunity to cash in up to 80 hours of unused vacation in the hopes of reducing liability for greater payments when workers retire with a higher salary. Between 2021 and 2023, the state’s vacation buyback program paid employees $288 million for unused hours. The program was not offered last year amid a deterioration in budget outlook.

Since 2022, Ortega said the state has started using holidays to see more people. That trend could continue to improve with work-to-work orders, she said.

In March, Newsom issued an executive order requiring about 95,000 state workers to return to their offices four days a week starting July 1.

Managers are supposed to create plans to reduce savings for employees beyond the cap on vacation, but Ortega acknowledges that they are not always followed and “not evenly implemented across all departments.”

She said it’s not just financial liability to the state to encourage employees to take leave. It’s about “the health of our workforce.”

“That’s part of the reason we take the holidays,” she said. “You want people to take a break and refresh themselves.”

Jordan, a retired prison psychologist, said taking leave is sometimes difficult for people who work particularly important jobs.

“You start earning too much vacation and there’s only what you can take,” he said.