BATON ROUGE - Detectives say they arrested an Exxon employee after he was accused of forging payroll time sheets, claiming more than $1,500 he didn’t earn over the course of several pay periods.

38-year-old Jesse Starks was booked on charges of public payroll fraud, forgery and felony theft following his arrest Wednesday.

The arrest report says Starks was employed at Exxon as a hydro-blast technician. For the week of Sept. 8, he documented that he worked a total of 48 hours with eight of those hours being overtime. For the week of Sept. 15, he said he worked a total of 62 hours with 22 of those hours being overtime. For the week of Sept. 21, Stark documented that he worked 84 hours with 44 hours of overtime included.

However, a supervisor noted that Stark only worked a total of 18.3 hours on the first week. In the following weeks, the man only actually logged about nine hours of actual work per pay period, according to documents from investigators. The supervisor said Stark stopped showing up for work altogether after Sept. 10.

When investigators compared a time sheet that was actually signed by the site supervisor to the time sheets filled out by Stark, they noted several discrepancies. Upon a check of the entry/exit reports from Exxon dating from Sept. 21 to Sept. 27, it was found that Stark had not logged in on any of those days. Every employee at the site is provided with a security card that must be scanned for entry/exit and is logged on an “In and Out” log sheet.

The investigation concluded that Stark was overpaid about $1,516 due to the forged time sheets.