T’S BIG VAULT FAULTS
MBTA guards $200M in YOUR CASH with duct-taped doors, broken cameras Auditor’s shock: My initial reaction was, ‘I can’t believe that a government agency is doing this work’
The MBTA’s so-called “money room” — where staffers count nearly $200 million a year in fares and other MassDOT funds — is riddled with “severe” security lapses, ranging from duct-taped doors and faulty cameras and alarms to broken timed locks on the main vault meant to ensure it’s not opened after hours, according to a damning audit of the facility.
The review, provided to the Herald and conducted over the past month at the MBTA’s cash operations facility in Charlestown, identified a series of “severe security dangers,” T officials said — and it would cost nearly $500,000 to fix them all, according to one consultant.
The audit comes as MBTA officials mull privatizing the cash operation, home to 70 union workers who help count $119 million from T vehicles and fare boxes each year, plus $75 million more from MassDOT and the cities of Boston and Cambridge.
Among the many lapses security consultant Shellie Crandall and the Chicago consultant firm, 4 Demand, found were:
• Employees routinely propped open doors using homemade doorstops. In one photo shared by the T, a door wedged open included a sign that read: “This door to remain shut at all times.” Those are measures of “convenience” Crandall said shouldn’t exist in a cash-counting facility.
• Another door leading to the vault room has a broken handle held together by duct tape.
• Not all doors have working alarms, including one that led to an outside area dubbed the “grill pit,” where employees had set up a grill and picnic table.
• Several of the facility’s 200 cameras were disabled, and the timed locks on the main vault — used to ensure it can’t be opened after hours — were broken.
• One small vault contained anywhere from 500 to 1,000 copies of keys that are used to open fare boxes, plus 3,000 more in another box waiting to be inventoried. T officials said many more were “haphazardly” strewn across the building, exposing the facility to a major security threat. “You don’t need 1,000 keys. You don’t need 100 keys,” Crandall said. “You’re talking less than five, 10 people should have those keys.”
• Employees also didn’t always wear their required uniforms. On one visit, Crandall said she instead found some employees sporting “Don’t Outsource” T-shirts, a jab at the Baker administration’s push to privatize the facility. One employee was wearing basketball shorts and flip-flops, she said.
“My initial reaction was, ‘I can’t believe that a government agency is doing this work,’ ” said Crandall, who helped lead the $50,000 audit and provided details to the Herald, most of which have yet to be released publicly.
“I would have loved to have that building at one of my (past) companies ... but they don’t know how to use it,” she said of T officials stationed at the cash operation building. “They don’t know how to run the business effectively. And on top of that, they have now put themselves at risk.”
The widespread security issues, Crandall said, left employees exposed.
“I know it may sound like I’m being dramatic, but I’ve been in this industry for 25 years. I’ve had eight people shot and killed on my watch. This is a very serious business,” she said of cash-handling operations. “I don’t know what has caused the management or (the employees) not to have that sense of understanding.”
Brian Shortsleeve, the T’s chief administrator, said the facility’s top four managers — all union members — have since been replaced. One, a transit police supervisor, was moved to a different position and three other T employees have “left the organization,” said Shortsleeve, who declined to specify if they were fired.
So far, the T has also spent $5,000 to change all the building’s exterior locks.
Shortsleeve said officials are investigating how much, if any, of the cash at the facility isn’t accounted for. A 2012 state audit report found as much as $101 million in “variances” over a five-year period at the facility.
“The problem was not with our employees, but how they were managed,” Shortsleeve said. “The problems at the money room go back a long way. And there’s been insufficient progress in eliminating those variances over time.”
The T has also brought in the firm 4GS on a $400,000 contract to provide private security at the facility, replacing some MBTA police officer details that have since been reassigned, according to Transit police Superintendent Richard Sullivan.
The T’s push to potentially privatize the money room operations has already sparked a protest from the Boston Carmen’s Union Local 589. James O’Brien, the union’s president, said “transit workers are being unfairly blamed for management’s failures.”
“The fact that MBTA leadership remains committed to moving forward with outsourcing without first addressing these problems is proof that they will seek privatization at any cost,” O’Brien said.