The practice of state and county employees “spiking” their pensions by booking huge amounts of overtime late in their careers has angered Hawaii taxpayers and unnerved some legislators. Beyond that, state senators are demanding an explanation of more than $2 million in overpayment of salaries, and should assign the state auditor to determine how the waste occurred.

A special committee headed by Sen. Donna Mercado Kim has advanced a resolution for state Auditor Marion Higa to review the use of overtime pay, excessive use of sick leave and other kinds of compensation that may have contributed to increased payments to employees and inflated pension payments.

The resolution also calls for Higa to examine the practice of “pension spiking,” the practice of public employees booking huge amounts of overtime as they near retirement to bolster their pensions. Simply banning that practice may be difficult. Loretta J. Fuddy, the state’s director of health, testified to legislators that the rules for determining who is assigned overtime may be part of union contracts.

“This process is generally accepted as fair and equitable,” Fuddy said.

But overpayments stemming from poor record-keeping of leave time, resulting in workers getting more pay than they were due, or when an employee left the job, are quite different. State officials say they are trying to recoup more than $1.5 million from current and former employees; they already have written off hundreds of thousands of dollars in other payments as uncollectible. Some of those payments date back to 1994.

Kim, chairwoman of the special Senate Committee on Accountability, said the state officials either neglected to regard the problem as a priority or important enough to pursue.

“That’s what’s so frustrating about this whole thing,” she said. “If it was their own money in their own household, I think there would be a different result.”

We share Kim’s ire. A firm, independent audit of the laxness in both departmental attitude and fiscal management is sorely needed to reveal problem spots and pinpoint areas of improvement.

While the spiking involved deliberate stacking of overtime to increase pensions based on salary in final years before retirement, some of the overpayments are believed to have involved poor record-keeping of leave time.

For example, a state schools employee was paid $27,000 after he retired. In another case, a Department of Public Safety employee was overpaid $31,000, of which the department was able to recover less than half before the worker declared bankruptcy.

Officials have blamed antiquated, paper-based record-keeping, which is expected to improve via revamping of the state’s information technology. Other problems from the past are blamed on lack of diligence. Senators had some of the harshest criticism for the Department of Accounting and General Services, which cuts paychecks for state employees.

The resolution approved by Kim’s committee would ask auditor Higa to review both the record-keeping errors that resulted in mistaken overpayment and the deliberate practice of booking huge amounts of overtime as state and county employees neared retirement. The two assignments might be very different, but both are surely needed.