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- A Buffalo fire department clerk was reportedly paid more than half a million dollars despite not working.
- Jill Repman collected checks for 7.5 years while on administrative leave after being accused of tampering with payroll, Investigative Post reports.
- She was working another job while she remained on the city's payroll, per Investigative Post.
An employee in Buffalo's City Hall was reportedly paid more than half a million dollars over the last seven years — for work she didn't do.
Jill Repman, formerly known as Jill Parisi, has collected checks totaling more than $500,000 while on administrative leave from her job and actually working a second one, according to an article published Thursday by local news organization Investigative Post.
Repman was a clerk in the fire department when she was put on administrative leave after being accused in 2016 of changing her Social Security/Medicare FICA deductions to bump her net pay on two separate occasions, Investigative Post reported.
But the disciplinary charges brought against her were never resolved, and the city kept her on its payroll, the news organization reported. All the while, she was working a second job in payroll at home-care agency Allwel Western New York, according to her since-deleted profile on the company's website.
The City of Buffalo has paid Repman $572,067 since 2016, the Investigative Post reported, citing state payroll records compiled by government watchdog The Empire Center.
Buffalo City Hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A call to Allwel's payroll department, where a voicemail identified an employee as "Jill," was not returned before publication, and Repman could not otherwise be reached for comment.
Overemployment — which refers to workers having multiple full-time jobs, often without informing their employers — has been a hot topic this year. White-collar workers in remote roles say juggling multiple jobs has helped them double their salaries amid high inflation, though there are some risks, including being found out.
The matter of so-called "fake work," referring to employees being paid to do little or no work, has also made headlines this year, primarily in the tech sector.
CEOs like Keith Rabois of Shopify aggregator OpenStore, and Thomas Siebel of artificial-intelligence company C3.ai said the mass layoffs sweeping the industry in recent months were a correction to overhiring in the pandemic tech boom of "extraneous" employees.
"There's nothing for these people to do — they're really — it's all fake work," Rabois said earlier this year. "Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings."
Some workers concur they had very little on their plates: Laid-off Meta worker Britney Levy posted a TikTok in March recounting being "hired into a really strange position where they immediately put me into a group of individuals that was not working."
"You had to fight to find work," she said. "They were just kind of, like, hoarding us like Pokémon cards."