Ex-county workers consider suit over reduced retirement

Former Albemarle employees who say they’ve been cheated out of money by the county are considering taking legal action against the local government, according to former police Officer Ron Kesner.

The county has offered employees monthly stipends in exchange for retiring early as a way to reduce personnel expenses. However, officials say a miscalculation caused them to offer 42 employees more money than intended. While the county is not making the employees pay back money they’ve received, the retirees are receiving less than they had been promised.

“All I want is what’s fair,” said Juanita Irvine, a former senior family support worker for the county’s social services department. “I made my decision to retire based on their figures.”

Kesner said that affected retirees are hoping to resolve the discrepancy with county officials and are considering legal action only as a “last resort.”

Officials have estimated that the mistake cost the county $66,000 in overpayments; had the error not been corrected, the county would have been out $360,000.

Questions about precisely how the stipends were miscalculated and who was to blame remain unanswered.

Kimberly Suyes, director of the county’s Human Resources Department, said there was a “miscalculation in the spreadsheet. There’s not much more.”

An employee in Human Resources made the error. Suyes declined to say whether the employee who made the error was fired.

Suyes also would not say whether a supervisor double-checked the math used by the employee before the stipend amounts were promised. “I’ll have to check our processes,” Suyes said. “I can’t answer that at this time.”

Suyes said she’s not sure whether there was any way employees could have known they had been offered payout amounts higher than the county intended.

“It’s not a difficult calculation, so whether anyone can go on there and figure it out, I do not know everybody’s skill level. Certainly it is not a difficult calculation, and the information is available through the [Virginia Retirement System] calculator. I mean, you’d have to plug in the information. You have to have the information on yourself to plug it in.”

So why didn’t a department supervisor catch the error earlier?

“I’ll have to think on that,” Suyes said.

Irvine said that she had no way of knowing county officials had offered her more money than intended.

“They said, ‘Here. This is the amount we’ll give you,’” Irvine said. “They could have given me figures all day long and I wouldn’t have known. I was trusting their calculations, and they offered to do the calculations. … I didn’t even know what formula they used.”

Irvine said she had been receiving a monthly check of about $690 but is now getting $229.

“If I was given the figures of $229 a month, I would have said, ‘I’m not going to retire now,’” Irvine said.

Irvine said that she asked county officials whether she could have her job back but was told that the county might be able to find her part-time work, which she declined. Irvine said she had hoped to retire and focus on “sewing and crafts,” community service work “and whatever I wanted.”

“I had an exceptional rating each year that I worked for the county, and I went above and beyond my duties to serve the citizens of Albemarle County, and I had the highest regard for the administrators,” Irvine said. “I feel betrayed, and I’m beginning to feel like the years of service really didn’t mean anything.”

Irvine is part of an informal pact of retirees affected by the reduced payouts. She is asking that other affected retirees contact her at 589-1276 or lazeedayone@embarqmail.com.

After discussing the dilemma earlier this month in a closed-door meeting, the Board of Supervisors unanimously decided to let the former employees keep the money they had already received but reduce future payouts to account for the error. The supervisors decided to offer the 42 retirees two options: receive the smaller payout the county says it intended or continue getting the bigger checks they were used to receiving but for less time.

Suyes said the county “is very sorry” for the administrative error. She said she has no response to retirees considering legal action.

“The matter’s been resolved,” Suyes said. “We’ve got policies and practices in place, and we implement them in a very fair and consistent manner and we’ve done an excellent job doing so. This was simply an error.

“And I think that the Board of Supervisors has been very generous in providing the overpayment and not requiring that it be repaid at this point and giving them options for how we can distribute the money going forward, but still, the end result would be the amount of money they should be receiving is what they would get,” Suyes said.