Dishonor system
‘Unvetted’ OT amid $1.4B tab
The MTA shelled out $1.4 billion in overtime alone last year — yet had no way to guarantee its employees actually worked the extra hours they claimed, the agency’s inspector general said Friday.
Instead, many of the MTA’s supervisors “relied entirely on the honesty of employees” — creating an “honor system” rife with opportunities for fraud, IG Carolyn Pokorny concluded after a review of the 75 overtime-collecting “high-rollers” among the agency’s 70,000person workforce.
Of particular concern were transit workers who spent their overtime hours away from their regular work sites — and the supervisors responsible for approving their time sheets.
The majority of supervisors interviewed for the report told the IG’s office they “do not or cannot” confirm that the off-site OT was assigned or worked.
A subway supervisor who never once attempted to verify one particular high earner’s off-site overtime told the IG’s office that its review inspired him to be more thorough — and ultimately scale back that employee’s hours.
In another instance, Long Island Rail Road employees collected OT for off-site work on behalf of an outside contractor — who did not keep any record that those hours had actually been worked.
“The absence of a proper system to verify . . . overtime hours could create opportunities for employees to claim overtime that was not worked or even assigned to them without being detected,” Pokorny said, calling the lack of effective oversight a “critical failure.”
Friday’s report is the latest salvo in Pokorny’s war on the soaring MTA overtime costs and fraud..
OT payments in 2018, $1.4 billion, was 8.5 percent of its budget — compared with $849 million in 2014.
A report released in August pinned some of the OT costs on archaic timekeeping methods.
The MTA began rolling out biometric timekeeping clocks system-wide this summer, but Pokorny said more must be done to integrate the tech with payroll.
“MTA management [must] use modern timekeeping methods that allow supervisors to easily and reliably verify claimed overtime,” she said in a statement.
MTA Inspector General Carolyn Pokorny this week provided fresh proof that the roots of the Long Island Rail Road’s overtime-fraud problems run deep.
Looking at “questionable” OT pay for LIRR foremen, she found at least four who logged travel time to and from overtime shifts as part of their extra pay, possibly earning as much as $146,800 from a practice that, she noted, is “very costly and wasteful”
and forbidden by their union contract. Having found similar patterns in other employees’ records, Pokorny suggests the abuse is “widespread.” Worse, managers turned a blind eye to the scam, allowing “a small group of workers to take advantage at taxpayer expense.”
All this is coming to light in the wake of the Empire Center’s huge public service of digging up the evidence of outrageous LIRR pensions, driven in good part by vast overtime earnings in some workers’ final years on the job.
Workers like ex-foreman Raymond Murphy, who scored $280,000 in OT — while often staying home. He’s also one of the traveltime game-players exposed in the latest IG report.
Notably, these scams have surfaced since a previous one — nearly every LIRR retiree qualifying for a disability pension — got squashed. Which suggests that, without a major attitude adjustment for the railroad’s management, some other fraud will take its place.