A new report by Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming documents how the Baltimore City Fire Department squandered taxpayer money for several decades by paying employees for promotions when positions became vacant, not when the employee actually started working in the position.

The practice, which appears to go back more than 30 years, allowed some firefighters to collect back pay for lengthy periods of time before they were actually promoted.

In one case, an employee got paid for 1,071 days (nearly three years) despite not occupying the promoted position.

The Fire Department is required to fill vacant positions. So in many instances, Cumming said, the department paid twice for the same job: once when the vacancy was covered by an employee on overtime or “acting out of title” pay, and, once again retroactively, when the position was filled by a permanent employee.

“The back pay process caused the City to pay multiple times for the same shifts and pay employees for work that they did not perform or were ineligible to perform during the period in question,” the city’s waste and fraud watchdog concluded, in a synopsis report issued today.

Hundreds Given Backdated Pay

The scale of backdating was substantial. Of 427 promotions reviewed between January 2020 and April 2025, 206 got backdated pay for work they did not perform.

In a sample of promotions in year 2024 for Pump Operator and Emergency Vehicle Driver jobs, Cumming’s investigators found that more than $30,000 was paid for unperformed work.

The report noted that union agreements with the BCFD do not contain clear language about how to handle promotional pay, which enabled an arbitrary, seat-of-the-pants back pay system to evolve over time.

The city’s new Workday payroll system complicated the convoluted system. Despite implementation of the computerized system in 2020, fire officials continued to use separate dates for actual promotions and dates for payroll purposes. Long backlogs made automated processing difficult, and often resulted in manual calculations and adjustments.

In August 2025, Fire Chief James W. Wallace wrote to the unions saying the promotion back pay system was unsustainable and, moving forward, promoted employees would only receive raises starting on the date of their promotion.

That decision was challenged by the unions and is currently under arbitration.

A two-day hearing was held in July and the matter is now pending before the arbitrator, “who has not indicated when he likely would issue his decision,” Wallace said.

Cumming referred her report to the Department of Audits in the Comptroller’s Office for further review.