Some Miami-Dade County firefighters have been paid to work in two places at once.

Others have logged as many as 99 hours straight, including off-duty "fire watch" shifts where they are required to stay awake and patrol buildings with broken fire alarms.

And the man who coordinates the department's off-duty patrols at fairs, public performances and sports events was paid twice for four Miami Dolphins football games he attended last year - once by the team, and then again by taxpayers, records show.

These are just some of the problems afflicting the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department's off-duty work programs - problems so pervasive that nobody yet has a handle on how much they might be costing the public. Businesses and taxpayers have paid $10.6 million since 2000 to hire firefighters for these extra assignments, records show. But a Miami Herald investigation found that the fire department has failed to monitor the programs or its firefighters' hours.

The department's payroll records are so poorly maintained, and so rarely scrutinized, that firefighters can file paperwork showing that they worked two different jobs at the same time - and nobody notices. It has happened at least 17 times since 2000, The Miami Herald found. Department officials said the cases could be explained by firefighters' exchanging shifts without properly documenting the swaps.

They acknowledge, though, that there is no way to guarantee that the employees weren't overpaid.

"The potential is there. It could happen, " Miami-Dade Fire Chief Herminio Lorenzo said last month.

Also, firefighters have been paid twice for the same job at least 23 times since October 2004, records show. Each time, firefighters worked off duty for private businesses, which paid them. Taxpayers paid them, too, at overtime rates.

Fire officials vowed to recover those extra payments, but insisted that they were innocent mistakes made by firefighters who didn't understand how off-duty payments were supposed to be handled.

"You could throw $600 in your paycheck and not even notice, " said Capt. William Van Meter, who runs the off-duty program.

Van Meter himself was double-paid on four occasions last year.

The Dolphins paid $272 a game for him to work off-duty shifts at the stadium on four Sundays last year: Sept. 25, Nov. 13, Dec. 4 and Dec. 18. Taxpayers also paid Van Meter $408 in overtime for each of those games, records show.

Van Meter said the double payments were the result of an "accounting error." He did not elaborate.

In an earlier interview, though, he pledged that overpayments "will be recovered."

But as of Friday, none of the extra payments had been returned, according to the county's payroll department.

While acknowledging that they overpaid some firefighters, fire officials say it's a small number compared to the volume of payroll records required for nearly 2,400 employees. They insist that these are isolated incidents.

"There might be an individual who has learned to beat the system, " said Scott Mendelsberg, the department's chief financial officer. "But that does not mean there is wholesale fraud in the system."

"In this organization, like any organization, like your organization, there are crooks, " Lorenzo said. If they are found, the chief said, "we will deal with them."

"If we find something that is not working right, we want to fix it, " he said.

MIAMI HERALD FINDINGS