Why Off-Duty and Overtime Transparency Is Critical to Maintaining Public Trust

Every year, law enforcement agencies around the country face a common challenge. It’s one that in recent years has resulted in multimillion-dollar lawsuits, officers losing their jobs, and agencies responsible for reversing nearly irreparable damage to the trust of their communities.

That challenge? Compliance failures in overtime and off-duty management. In recent years, these issues have been reported on at a seemingly higher frequency.

In October 2025, two officers were fired from a county after it discovered they were “double-dipping” and falsifying timecards. In March 2025, an officer was charged with scheming to defraud and grand theft after billing employers for off-duty jobs he didn’t attend. In September 2025, a police chief was handed federal prison time for an overtime fraud scheme that lasted years.

From double-dipping to broader fraud schemes, these instances can crop up for agencies with disturbing regularity, even where they’re least expected. Many of these incidents follow a similar pattern: an irregularity is noticed, an investigation begins, media coverage follows, and public trust in law enforcement takes an expected hit.

Even when off-duty compliance issues are dealt with swiftly, an agency’s public credibility—something that can take years to build with a community—can erode seemingly overnight. For that reason, it’s more important than ever for agencies to take a proactive, instead of reactive, approach to off-duty management that minimizes the opportunity for these compliance challenges to occur in the first place.

That’s easier said than done, perhaps, but it can be addressed with the right technology and systems in place. Today, the stakes for agencies are higher than ever. When communities lose trust in the agencies that serve them, it becomes more difficult for those agencies to secure funding, resources, and personnel needed to maintain a high level of policing.

For modern law enforcement agencies, the challenge is to embrace transparency in a way that upholds public trust while also protecting officers, staff, and agencies who serve their communities day in and day out.

The Public Attention of Overtime and Off-Duty Work

The heightened scrutiny around overtime and off-duty work comes from several angles. First, this area is often tied to taxpayer funding, which means overtime spending appears on local ledgers and becomes a prominent point in community meetings.

Off-duty work, even when funded by a private employer, attracts similar attention when officers are uniformed and often using departmental resources. With off-duty work being so public, it naturally draws attention from a public that doesn’t always understand how on-duty and off-duty assignments differ.

Naturally, the public doesn’t see the underlying processes at work in determining how overtime and off-duty assignments are managed, and when media attention amplifies the issue, it’s easy to see how compliance conflicts quickly gain attention—often the wrong kind.

Even when there are no compliance issues with off-duty management, the lack of clarity between the public and the agencies they serve can foster speculation and skepticism. And when compliance issues do occur, this makes it all the more difficult to maintain public credibility.

Building Systems that Prevent Compliance Issues (Before they Start)

Transparency in off-duty management begins and ends with infrastructure and enforcement. Decades ago, agencies lacked the technology and systems to fully track how a workforce adhered to policy.

Today, that’s not the case. Automated time tracking and real-time schedule visibility give agencies a clear view of how their personnel break down day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year. Tech-enabled audit trails make it easier to see who’s working where, and departmental policies can be followed when they’re built into scheduling platforms.

Often, transparency is used as a public-facing concept to build trust and visibility. But behind the scenes, transparency is just as crucial to protecting agencies and officers as it is to serving the public.

A clear, straightforward approach to off-duty and overtime work is the best way to avoid public misinterpretation and future compliance issues. Agencies can respond to off-duty questions and potential legal problems with well-founded documentation, rather than relying on manual processes that seemed to get the job done at the time.

In recent cases of double-dipping and overtime fraud issues, for instance, a more transparent view of off-duty and overtime work may have alerted agencies to hour irregularities far before they became widespread—and public—issues.

Off-duty transparency protects officers as well. When off-duty and overtime policies are clear, documented, and enforced with technology, it’s far easier for officers to know what’s permitted and what’s not. Eliminating ambiguity should be a primary goal for any off-duty management platform or process that prioritizes transparency for officers, the agency, and the public.

Transparency as Protection for Your Agency

In today’s media cycles, compliance issues related to off-duty and overtime management have never been made more public. For agencies, the only way to manage these challenges proactively is to put transparency front and center in a way that minimizes the opportunity for irregularities to occur in the first place.

Today’s most forward-thinking law enforcement agencies and leaders don’t leave transparency and off-duty integrity to manual or outdated processes. They understand that the public trust and reputations they’ve built over the years can only be upheld when department policies are enforced without exception.

At PowerDetails, we recognize the role and importance of transparency, and have built that core tenet into our gold-standard off-duty management platform.

Public trust is hard-earned and easily lost, which is why PowerDetails helps agencies manage overtime and off-duty work in a way that’s policy-driven, auditable, and transparent from start to finish. For agencies seeking to secure public trust, improve departmental resources, and provide officers with an unparalleled level of protection, PowerDetails is ready to help.

Contact us today to request your demo.