Former Police Chief Diaz Headed for Brady List; City’s New Payroll System Still Leaves Some Unpaid

A billboard for Workday in Atlanta: “Be a rock star of business” with “one epic platform”

1. Former Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz—fired earlier this month after an investigation found he had an affair with a subordinate, Jamie Tompkins, and lied about it—will be put on King County’s Brady list of dishonest cops as soon as next week, the King County Prosecutor’s Office confirmed. The Brady list is a list of law enforcement officers whose testimony in court is suspect because they have a history of dishonesty, calling their future testimony into question.

“The Brady list is meant to comply with Constitutional requirements to provide notice to defendants if a witness in their case can be impeached in court,” KCPAO  spokesman Casey McNerthney said.

King County is awaiting confirmation from the city’s Office of Police Accountability that they’ve sustained a finding of dishonesty against Diaz. According to McNerthney, this typically takes “a few days—likely we’ll get it soon after the new year if not sooner.”

McNerthney noted that Diaz “isn’t expected to be a witness in upcoming cases.” But the real impact of being on a Brady list is the stain it puts on a law enforcement officer’s record. Diaz, once considered a top candidate for police chief in Austin, Texas, will now be known as the chief who got demoted amid allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination, responded by going on a right-wing radio show to announce he was gay, got caught lying about an affair with a woman he hired and promoted, and finally got fired and put on a special list for dishonest officers.

The final formal penalty Diaz could face—separate from any future court-ordered judgments in ongoing and potential future lawsuits against him—is decertification as a law enforcement officer by the state. His name is not on a list of current decertification investigations; we’ve contacted the state’s Criminal Justice Training Commission, which certifies and decertifies law enforcement officers, to find out if they’re planning to initiate a decertification investigation.

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2. Current and former city of Seattle employees continue to report issues with Workday, the cloud-based HR and finance system whose October debut was plagued by underpayments, overpayments, vanishing sick and vacation days, and other problems.

Among other issues, employees have reported that Workday is failing to accrue and update their vacation, sick leave, and comp time correctly, leading to the denial of time off that they’ve earned and should be allowed to take. Other employees report that their paychecks have started showing that they have several weeks of time off for military leave, even though they’ve never served in the military. And just last week, apparently due to a glitch in how some employees’ hours were imported into Workday from an internal city system, some people reported that they didn’t get a paycheck at all.

Additionally, people in “out of class” positions—temporary assignments that pay more than their current job classification—have not been paid correctly; one person reported being short around $5,000 between two paychecks, while others reported losing out on vacation pay.

Megan Erb, the spokeswoman for the city’s IT department, Erb said some of the issues people are reporting stem from “the challenge of adapting to a new system.” Military leave, for example, is available to all employees who qualify, but it didn’t show up as an option on every city employee’s paycheck until Workday went into effect. “While an employee may see a military leave entitlement balance in their Workday account, it does not mean the employee is eligible for this leave,” Erb said.

The city has generally characterized each problem with Workday as a one-off issue that they were able to correct easily one employees brought it to their attention. For example, Erb said the errors in vacation time resulted from “a data conversion issue that caused Workday to show some incorrect vacation balances. Impacted employees and their supervisors have been notified the balances are now accurate.”

But other agencies and jurisdictions have reported similar issues, including the University of Washington, where problems with Workday delayed hundreds of research grants; Los Angeles, where employees experienced  under- and overpayments for months; and Oregon, which filed multiple lawsuits after problems with their paychecks dragged on for months.

A contract with Deloitte, the high-profile consultant brought on to help with Workday implementation, ballooned between 2022 and 2023 (the last year for which PubliCola has been able to obtain records from the city), growing from $14,754,000 to $17,852,000—an increase of more than 20 percent.

PROTEC17, a union that represents more than 3,000 city employees, has requested a third-party audit of Workday to identify what went wrong with the system and how it can be fixed. They’re also reportedly considering a demand to bargain over the impact the city’s decision to implement Workday has had on union members’ working conditions at the city. We’ve reached out to PROTEC17’s labor negotiator and will update this post if we hear back.

One thought on “Former Police Chief Diaz Headed for Brady List; City’s New Payroll System Still Leaves Some Unpaid”

  1. The state of Washington is going to be using workday eventually too. Not looking forward to that switch.

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