Westfield seeks audit to determine scope of city employee payroll problem

Westfield plans to conduct a payroll audit going back 17 years—to when the former town became a city—after officials recently discovered a firefighter had experienced incorrect payroll deductions for more than a decade-and-a-half.

Mayor Scott Willis discussed the audit at Monday night’s Westfield City Council meeting during a discussion that began with a question about the firefighter who asked about his recent deductions. Clerk-Treasurer Marla Ailor fixed the problem the firefighter asked about, but a deeper investigation found there were issues with the firefighter’s deductions dating back to 2009.

“We’re going to do an audit, a very forensic audit,” Willis said. “It will be somewhat random in nature. We’re not going to go line-by-line by employee, but we’re going to be looking for errors because [Willis and Ailor are] both concerned with some of the issues that we’ve seen here recently, that they may be deeper than what we know.”

Last month, a Westfield firefighter’s union representative told councilors that firefighters had inaccurate payments during the first three pay periods of the year.

The problems included double deductions for taxes and for contributions to retirement and medical accounts. Some firefighters didn’t receive direct deposits even though the payroll processor showed they had been paid. Others didn’t receive pay for their overtime hours.

The discussion on Monday night began when City Council President Patrick Tamm asked for clarification about an item in the city’s claims docket—city payments that are presented to the council for approval—and noted the problem the firefighter had with his deductions for 16 years.

Tamm said he does not believe the situation with the individual firefighter is an isolated situation and noted that the clerk-treasurer’s office “recently had to let somebody else go that, frankly, was probably responsible for this exact situation.”

“I want to make sure that the record is stated that we have to do a comprehensive payroll audit because we have a lot of liability and a lot of exposure,” Tamm said.

Tamm emphasized multiple times that the deduction problem did not happen under Ailor’s watch. Ailor was elected as clerk-treasurer in 2023 and took the office in January 2024. She replaced the retiring Cindy Gossard, who had served in the position since 2001 and was involved in several legal disputes with the city in the years before she retired.

Willis said that if the city finds errors during the audit, officials and auditors will change course and go line-by-line and check every employee since 2008 (when Westfield became a city) to ensure they have been paid correctly. He noted that the financial losses could go beyond the amounts found in the incorrect payroll statements.

“There’s a lost opportunity of what that money could have done in their pension in the market over the last 16 years,” Willis said. “I don’t think the employee has been made completely right. I know if it was my money and you’re taking 16 years of what we’ve seen in the stock market, and you’re not allowing that to draw interest, I’m not going to be real happy about that.”

The city has not yet selected a company to conduct the audit, and a timeline for the audit has not been determined.