CARB paid an employee $171K after his leave hours ran out
Summary
California's Air Resources Board never fixed a leave-tracking error that began with a 2019 records mistake, and kept paying one employee's full salary for nearly 15 months after his leave was actually exhausted -- $171,446 in improper pay. When CARB investigated itself to find out how much it owed, its own math missed $46,741 of that total, a December 2025 State Auditor review found.
A 2019 records error nobody was left to fix
The failure traces back to a 2019 CARB reorganization that changed the employee's position number -- the identifier state payroll systems use to track leave and pay. CARB sent the updated number to the State Controller's Office⧉, which flagged an error in the update. The CARB staffer assigned to fix that error left the agency in 2022, and no one else picked it up. From 2019 until the employee eventually retired, the Controller's official leave system never accurately reflected the hours he was actually using.
Two years of leave, on a policy capped at six
In 2022 the employee opted for an open-ended leave of absence to burn down his vacation balance before retiring -- a real benefit under CARB's own Leave Usage Pending Retirement policy, which caps that runway at 90 days without special sign-off, or 180 days with approval from a senior executive. His leave began in July 2022 and, per the Auditor⧉, ran for about two years -- far past what his actual hours supported -- while he kept collecting a full paycheck. His direct supervisor signed off on the open-ended leave; the supervisor's own manager and CARB's Human Resources leadership both told auditors they didn't know about it.
View data as table
| Legitimate leave (Jul 2022-Jun 2023) | 11 |
|---|---|
| Full pay after leave exhausted (Jun 2023-Aug 2024) | 15 |
His leave balances were actually exhausted by June 2023. CARB kept paying his full salary anyway, for nearly 15 more months through August 2024, before it finally caught the problem and canceled his pay warrants in September 2024. Nobody caught it sooner because, per the report, CARB's monthly timesheet reviews were ineffective, it ran no regular leave audits, and it had no process comparing an employee's timesheet against the Controller's own leave records -- the exact monthly check CalHR's Human Resources Manual requires every state agency to run.
CARB investigated its own mistake, and got that wrong too
CARB only found the problem after the employee mentioned in December 2023 that he intended to retire, then didn't file the paperwork; HR staff pieced together that his leave balances were wrong only after a further round of emails between April and September 2024. CARB then ran its own leave audit and calculated an overpayment of $124,705, seeking $86,612 back in net repayment. The State Auditor reviewed that self-audit⧉ and found three separate errors in it -- unverified sick leave, training hours the employee never logged, and excess holiday credit -- that together hid $46,741 of the true total. The real figure is $171,446: CARB's own math, on its own overpayment, missed more than a quarter of the money.
View data as table
| Caught by CARB's own self-audit | 124,705 |
|---|---|
| Missed entirely by CARB's own self-audit | 46,741 |
What CARB says it's fixing
The Auditor told CARB to reassess its leave-audit math and pursue repayment, confirm every position-number change is accurate in the Controller's system, fix the control gaps with a real monthly leave-audit process, and check whether managers need more training on leave policy. CARB's written response says it corrected the position-number error, confirmed no other employee was hit by a similar glitch, is collecting the overpayment from the employee, is revising the Leave Usage Pending Retirement policy the case exposed, and has already stood up a monthly leave-audit process.
The takeaway
- A single unresolved records error paid out for years. A 2019 position-number glitch, left unfixed after the one person assigned to it left CARB in 2022, meant the state's official leave records for this employee were wrong from that point until his eventual retirement -- with nothing in CARB's monthly timesheet or leave-review process built to catch it.
- The overpayment window outlasted the leave itself. The employee's leave was legitimately accruing for about 11 months before it ran out in June 2023; CARB then kept paying him for nearly 15 more months on top of that -- longer than the leave period that was actually earned.
- CARB's own audit of its own mistake still undercounted it by 27%. Investigating itself, CARB calculated a $124,705 overpayment; the State Auditor's review found calculation errors that had hidden $46,741 of the true $171,446 -- a reminder that a self-audit is only as good as the same controls that missed the problem the first time.
The report does not name the employee. As of the report's December 2025 publication, CARB said it was 'in the process of collecting' the overpayment -- the report does not state how much, if any, had actually been recovered by that point. This case is one of five substantiated whistleblower investigations in the same State Auditor report (I2025-1); separate BlackLeaf coverage examines two of the other four, at the Employment Development Department and CalVet's Yountville Veterans Home. The 'about two years' leave duration and the 90/180-day policy caps are the report's own characterizations; the 11-month legitimate-leave figure in this piece's chart is this publication's own month count from the report's stated start (July 2022) and exhaustion (June 2023) dates, not a number the report states directly.
Sources(1) ▾
- California State Auditor, Investigations of Improper Activities by State Agencies and Employees: Waste, Improper Payments, Misuse of State Resources, and Other Improper Governmental Activities (Report I2025-1) (2025-12-12) — The full California State Auditor investigative report, read directly via its extractable text layer. This piece draws on the report's California Air Resources Board case (Case I2024-13524), including the report's own review and correction of CARB's internal self-audit of the overpayment. auditor.ca.gov · original document
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The California Air Resources Board did not accurately track one employee's leave hours⧉ and kept paying his full salary for many months after those hours ran out and he was no longer working. A California State Auditor investigation, opened on a whistleblower complaint, found CARB overpaid the employee $171,446 across nearly 15 months, from June 2023 through August 2024 -- and that when CARB tried to calculate the damage itself, it got the number wrong too.