After raking in half a million dollars for being "on call," California's top paid public employee of 2011 -- a prison psychiatrist from Newark -- has been suspended with pay for allegedly falsifying time records, officials said Tuesday.

Dr. Mohammad Safi, 54, was paid more than $803,000 last year as a supervising senior psychiatrist at a Department of State Hospitals facility within Salinas Valley State Prison in Monterey County, records show.

That amount included more than $503,000 for on-call pay -- in Safi's case being available to respond quickly to emergencies.

His suspension was first reported Wednesday by Bloomberg News, which published an extensive analysis of state government pay that ranked California tops in the nation. It showed Safi was paid more than twice as much as any state psychiatrist in the 12 states Bloomberg examined.

Efforts to reach Safi were unsuccessful Tuesday but his lawyer, Edward Caden, called his client "a scapegoat" for a staffing crisis created by the state.

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