A report from Alcudia Town Hall's Comptroller's Office indicates that the local police were paid €337,451 for 11,552 hours of overtime in 2023. The report is harshly critical of what it considers to have been a lack of oversight. There were 58 officers. The legal limit for overtime is 80 hours per annum, giving a total for the 58 officers of 4,640 hours.
A reason for this situation, according to the report, is that the time tracking software for municipal employees had not been adapted to the specific characteristics of police work. It therefore failed to provide reliable information regarding the annual calculation of hours worked.
An opposition party at the town hall, Podemos, says it will demand explanations from the mayor and will study whether the irregularities constitute an offence. If so, the matter will be taken to court.
The report directly targets the citizen security department headed by Vox councillor Juan José Sendín and the Partido Popular mayor, Fina Linares. "It is extremely serious that the police do not facilitate control and oversight in these matters. It is unacceptable that the mayor's office and the head of the citizen security department allow this lack of collaboration and transparency and police behaviour that repeatedly violates the principle of good administration."
Sendín says: "It is not true that overtime hours are not justified. The computerised control system we have is archaic and designed to clock in from 8am to 3pm Monday to Friday, not for those who work shifts, like police officers.
"We have 58 officers for a population of 21,000. Alcudia should have 80. Furthermore, we are a tourist municipality whose population increases in the summer to peaks of 80,000 people in a single day. In addition, we have to provide surveillance for fairs, fiestas and mass events."
The town hall administration insists that the issue has to with the administrative control of pay, not the need to provide the services, and adds that the merger of two computer systems to facilitate the verification of officers' schedules is being studied.