I’m sure the students and taxpayers who pay the salaries of these employees will be happy to read this. H/t to The College Fix.

Jon Humbert of KOMO News reports.

State: UW workers paid overtime while reading celebrity gossip

SEATTLE — A recent ruling from the State Ethics Board found that two University of Washington employees violated rules when it came to personal use of state resources.

The board looked through their Internet browser history and found that the employees were paid overtime while they were browsing the web for celebrity gossip and sports news.

College students sometimes get to bend or even break the rules, but state employees do not.

“So it seemed to me that it was an inappropriate use of overtime if they were getting paid to surf the Internet,” said Melanie Deleon, the director of the State Ethics Board.

Deleon recently released a massive report detailing the questionable practices at the University of Washington’s Fire Alarm Technician Department.

“A lot of the time, it looked like they were surfing the Internet on days where they got paid overtime,” she said.

KOMO had already reported on the two workers, Stan Ross and Don Hulse. The men took home tens of thousands of dollars extra each of the last few years, thanks to increased overtime pay.

Deleon said she isn’t happy with what taxpayers got in return.

“When a person is basically an hourly employee but they get overtime, and they’re using that overtime to surf the Internet, to me, that’s more egregious,” she said.

Ethics Board records show that one day Hulse surfed the web for nearly five hours and spent the bulk of that time on sports websites, all while collecting overtime pay.

Don Stephens initially came to the Problem Solvers to blow the whistle on his own workers.

“I tend to believe that if I screwed around for four hours of my eight hour day, I would be in trouble,” he said.