The Chronicles of Fischer: Vacation Abuser

First of all, many thanks to Cindy Kilkenny over at Fairly Conservative for all her hard work to help break this story and bring to light a gross abuse of taxpayer dollars, not to mention a willful violation of state employee leave policies.

As first reported by Cindy, it’s been confirmed Kevin Fischer, a legislative aide in State Senator Mary Lazich’s office, used more vacation time in 2007 than he was allotted. In fact, Fischer used up 46 more hours of vacation than what he was allotted, which given his yearly salary, equates to roughly $2,000 in pay (if my math is correct). In other words, Kevin Fischer milked the taxpayers of Wisconsin for more than $2,000 worth of pay for vacation time he wasn’t entitled to take. What’s more, this isn’t the first year Kevin Fischer has overused (abused) the vacation time allotted to him, as Fischer went negative on vacation hours in 2006, too, to the tune of 46 more hours that had to be returned in 2007.

Here’s the real money quote from Cindy’s blog entry:

Kevin Fischer likes his vacation time. Let’s hope 2008 is a little more true to what he earns. The Senate administrator that just gave me a call indicates they are doing their best to tighten up these policies. He also indicates that there are very few employees that have this much trouble keeping their vacation resources in check.

First of all, I’m of the belief this is a little more than an employee having “trouble” keeping his or her vacation resources in check. I don’t know about Kevin Fischer’s paychecks, but most other state employees get an updated accounting of their leave balances with each new paycheck stub they receive, so there’s absolutely no excuse for a state employee not being able to keep track of how much vacation, personal, or sick leave time they have, other than willful disregard of course. However, while I believe Kevin Fischer should be held responsible for his continued pattern of abuse of the state’s vacation leave policies, I’m not holding my breath, simply because he’s been allowed to continue to abuse his vacation leave time by his supervisor, who seems oblivious – or unconcerned – about his abuses.

State employees are disciplined all the time for these kinds of abuses of their leave time, and I can only hope Kevin Fischer is held accountable in some way for his chronic abuse of his vacation time.