BLAINE COUNTY — It appears the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office has discovered a brilliant new accounting trick, maybe straight from Vince Mancini! A recent conversation with a Blaine County Sheriffs Office Deputy found that they count their patrol hours twice! Hours get logged once as “normal patrol hours,” and again as “sub‑division patrol hours”, and then they add the two together! The result? Their total hours magically balloon to double what actually happened.
Sources inside the department (who asked to remain unnamed, presumably because they’re still trying to explain Sheets) told Weazel News that when a deputy patrols, that time gets logged normally. Then, if that deputy happens to be working under any of the office’s subdivisions, the exact same hours are logged again, this time under the subdivision column. The department then adds both columns together. Voilà — double the hours from a single shift.
Our finance editors were able to make use of their MBAs to, well, return to grade school. Our team started by checking the department’s own live roster. Right now, it shows 615 full-time hours worked. Then, look at the hours listed under subdivisions: 76, 102, and 189.
That’s right: 615 + 76 + 102 + 189 = 983. The exact number they’re reporting as the total department hours! So either deputies have suddenly learned how to duplicate themselves like troopers on a traffic stop or the department is simply adding every category together, including hours that are already accounted for in the full-time total.
We tried to get a reaction from the citizens of Sandy Shores: after all, they’re the ones supposedly safeguarded by these heroic deputies. Unfortunately, our reporters didn’t seem to be able to get residents to comprehend their questions. Even after we tried teaching them simple addition with donut‑holes, they promptly ate the learning aids and muttered something about “too many numbers.”
So we have to ask: What exactly is the department trying to do here?
Are they trying to scam the government, and by extension, taxpayers, into paying for hours that were never worked?
Is this a case of straight‑up embezzlement or corruption?
Or are they trying to trick the people of Blaine County into believing the deputies are far more present and active than they actually are?
Or maybe, just maybe, these “highly educated” officers simply don’t understand how the “SUM” function works in a spreadsheet. Maybe they accidentally hit “=SUM(A + A)” instead of “=A.” Who knows? After all, this is supposedly the “Department of the Year.”
The Blaine County Sheriff’s Office says its first core value is Integrity. Do you think they model that?
