Manatee County underpaid emergency medical service workers by at least $336,607 over a recent nine-month period after its payroll system failed to properly calculate overtime, according to an audit obtained by Suncoast Searchlight.
The audit found that more than 200 EMS employees were owed back pay between June 28 and March 30. Some workers were shorted a few hundred dollars. Others were owed thousands. One veteran paramedic was underpaid by $9,000.
The county launched the audit in response to workers’ complaints about the paycheck discrepancies, according to Lori Stephens, a CPA in the Inspector General’s Office. The investigation found the county’s payroll vendor, UKG, was “not correctly counting hours worked toward the calculation of overtime” as required by the collective bargaining agreement.
The problems were significant enough that the auditor is now expanding the probe by an additional three months to determine whether employees were underpaid outside the original audit period.
For many EMS workers, the errors created more than administrative headaches. Employees have been complaining on social media for months that hitches with the time-keeping system have hurt department morale, created financial hardship and undercut recruitment and retention efforts.
“We would like to get paid," said Nate Zecco, a charge paramedic and union shop steward, in an interview with Suncoast Searchlight. “A lot of EMS providers depend on OT.”
County officials said the trouble started soon after Manatee County commissioners approved a new collective bargaining agreement for EMS workers in early June 2025, which included new overtime rules. Workers who picked up shifts outside their normal schedules were supposed to receive overtime pay, but the audit found many did not.
“They told me in an email it was one amount and then the pay stub/direct deposit was about $400 short,” Karleigh Alday, a former Paramedic of the Year, posted on the Support Manatee EMS public Facebook page month. “Not sure what to even believe anymore.”
Manatee County’s audit revealed Alday was shorted more than $1,000 during the nine-month review. Attempts to reach Alday on Facebook Messenger were unsuccessful.
Manatee County communications manager Casey Zempel said the county has since switched to manually processing EMS and that all the employees who were shorted have been reimbursed.
The county had already hired a different contractor in 2024 to install a new human resources information system before the overtime problems emerged. Zempel said the new system is expected to resolve the payroll issues, but he could not say when it would be fully operational.
“We regret that this error occurred and remain committed to implementing process improvements to help prevent similar issues from happening in the future,” Zempel said in an email to Suncoast Searchlight.
UKG, which has two U.S. headquarters, including one in Westin, works with more than 80,000 organizations across 150 countries, according to its website.
The company did not respond to three requests for comment through a dedicated media email address. A request for comment through an online contact form was also not responded to. A woman who answered the phone at the company’s Weston headquarters directed a reporter to the media email address.
Suncoast Searchlight reached out to 11 EMS workers for this story via cellphone or Facebook Messenger. Four, including Zecco, responded. One said he was directed by his superiors to refer calls to the county public information officer. Two others, including local union president Jeremy Peterson, declined to go on the record. The remaining seven did not respond.
In light of the problems in Manatee County, EMS employees have asked for help from elected leaders. Manatee County Commission Chair Tal Siddique told Suncoast Searchlight the payroll issue has been frustrating.
“It’s our software,” he said. “At the end of the day, we need to be paying our EMTs.”
Previous problems with UKG
The recent issues were not the first payroll problems to emerge after Manatee adopted UKG.
The county signed a contract with the company, then known as Kronos SaaShr, in September 2021 to maintain a payroll timekeeping system for a one-time fee of $190,000, plus an annual payment of $176,000, according to the contract. It went live in late July 2022.
Within months, human resources officials were discussing payroll issues, which included overpayments and underpayments, according to a screenshot of an internal message viewed by Suncoast Searchlight.
Salaried employees were being paid overtime they were not entitled to, while hourly employees were not receiving the overtime pay they had earned.
The problems in Manatee mirror issues reported elsewhere in Florida.
In Volusia County, an audit released in March found EMS workers had been underpaid and overpaid because of UKG payroll errors. Some workers had been underpaid by as much as $2,000 while others had been overpaid by more than $10,000.
One employee was overpaid by more than $62,000, according to the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and the worker was required to pay it back.
The problem was traced to how the Kronos Workforce Central timekeeping system, where employees clock in and out, interacted with the CGI payroll system, which produces paychecks.
UKG also has been linked to other disruptions in Florida. In Sarasota County, which used the company’s Workforce Central payroll system, operations were disrupted for six weeks after a December 2021 ransomware attack shut down UKG’s Kronos Cloud Solutions platform.
The county stated in a document there were “issues” with Kronos’ security that “initiated a multi-month disruption that forced the county to use an alternate, manual process to process payroll.”
The county switched to a competitor, Workday, which is used by major companies like Target. The migration took nine months.
“Moving time tracking to Workday provides necessary security while allowing for the addition of employee-friendly user conveniences,” county public information officer Emily Blaine said in an emailed statement.
Former Assistant Chief of Operations Larry Luh, who retired in 2023 after working 37 years for Manatee EMS, said he sympathizes with employees.
“Especially the ones that are just starting out,” he said. “That’s a pretty big hit for them.”
Young hires don’t make as much as veterans and may not have any money saved to get them through tough times. He said the paycheck problems have been going on for too long, stressing that they affect morale and retention.
Calculating hours for emergency workers, though, can be complicated due to lengthy shifts, different pay for different shifts. and the various codes used.
“EMS work scheduling is complex, and we had better luck managing with a calculator and paper time sheet,” Luh said. “But again, I just find it hard to believe a big company like Kronos can’t figure that out.”
Zempel said the challenge with situations like this is that labor contracts change over time, and each new contract can require updates to payroll configurations.
“Those payrolls are set up and tested in the system, but occasionally system errors occur and require corrections to ensure employees are paid accurately,” he said.
‘Egregious and outrageous situation’
Ruth Harenchar is a retired chief information officer and president of the League of Women Voters of Manatee County. She is also chair of the Manatee Healthcare Alliance and has been following the paycheck issue closely.
A former partner with the accounting and professional consulting firm Ernst & Young, she has worked with payroll services platforms for decades.
“The very people who get called out every day to save the lives of potentially every Manatee County resident cannot count on being paid accurately,” she said in an interview with Suncoast Searchlight. “Knowingly continuing to underpay EMS personnel is an egregious and outrageous situation to me.”
Zempel said making corrections can take time, noting employees experienced delays of “one to two pay periods before receiving corrected compensation.”
The Manatee County Commission has greenlighted a plan to replace its HR information system, a move that should “help permanently resolve this issue,” Zempel said.
It’s not certain when the project will be completed. An 80-page request for proposals went out on Sept. 5, 2024, according to a public notice. More than a year later, the county awarded a five-year, $2.8 million contract to NEOGOV, which describes itself as “the leader in public sector HR software.”
In the request for proposals, the county spelled out the challenges with employing payroll and other human resource systems.
“Most of these systems have evolved organically and sometimes in isolation,” the request says. “This piecemeal evolution has introduced challenges to achieving best practice processes for our organizations.”
Zempel said human resources has elevated the implementation of the time and attendance module, the element of the payroll system that went wrong, as a top priority “and is working to address it immediately.”
The new system will be for all county employees.
“Airing our dirty laundry makes it hard to do recruiting,” said Zecco, the charge paramedic and union shop steward. “This place has a lot of potential, but this crap needs to get fixed.”
This story was produced by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.
