Chicago District Chief Demoted in Payroll Scam

A district fire chief with an annual salary of over $155,000 has been demoted and faces suspension for his participation in another payroll scam within the Chicago Fire Department.

The Chicago Sun Times reports that Deputy District Chief Edgar Ignacio Silvestrini, the director of the department's Medical Section, also faces a lengthy suspension along with a paramedic-in-charge who was involved in the scheme.

Silvestrini is accused of looking the other way while the unnamed paramedic-in-charge under his command "regularly" left shift early to attend medical education classes on city time without properly clocking out.

The Sun Times says sources close to the probe into the matter described it as "isolated, but serious."

This isn't the first time Chicago taxpayers have footed the bill while firefighters took advantage of the payroll.

In June 2012, an arbitrator overturned the city's firing of four firefighters and reduced lengthy suspensions for 44 others in the Fire Prevention Bureau where padding mileage expenses was so rampant and even condoned that it was said to be "almost a work rule."

At the time, arbitrator Edwin Benn said there was “no real dispute” as to whether the padding had occurred, but he noted that it was a “decades-long practice” that was taught, “condoned and encouraged by supervisors.”

“The amount of discipline imposed under these circumstances cannot be of a degree that should be imposed if condonation and encouragement at this level did not exist,” Benn wrote in his ruling.