MTA handling runaway OT with paper & ‘honor system’

Transit bosses across the MTA still use paper timesheets and an “honor system” to verify worker hours — despite an expensive push last year to crack down on overtime fraud, the agency’s inspector general found.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority board in July 2019 approved a $23.75 million contract with the company Kronos to install digital timekeeping clocks throughout the agency’s facilities.

The bulk of the devices require workers to use their fingerprints to punch in and out of work to better verify worker hours. They were purchased after a report found the MTA spent $1.3 billion on overtime in 2018, a $100 million increase from the year before.

But the fancy new devices have hardly been used since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the MTA’s IG says in a report to be released Friday.

Workers and managers are wary of standing in lines to clock out and sharing the touch pads that track their fingerprints — so transit bosses have moved back to tracking employee hours on paper and using an “honor system” to verify worker attendance, the IG report states.

“Half of the [payroll] approvers the office of the inspector general interviewed in the third quarter [of 2020] continued to rely on paper records such as sign in/out sheets or labor distribution sheets, which can be easily manipulated as the basis for approving employees’ payroll,” according to the report.

The MTA’s overtime expenses fell by 12% in the first nine months of 2020 compared to 2019, a drop largely attributed to deferred maintenance amid the pandemic.

“As the inspector general notes, most recommended reforms have already been implemented even during a pandemic, and results are clear,” said MTA spokeswoman Meredith Daniels. “Overtime expense was reduced by $70 million in the first nine months of this year, with another $200 million projected to be cut in 2021.”

But transit bosses still have little way to prevent another case of rampant overtime fraud, such as the the four foreman in the Long Island Rail Road’s engineering department who scored in a combined $650,000 in overtime during 2018.

Some overtime requests at the MTA still happen over text messages, emails or phone calls as the MTA has not yet fully integrated the fancy new Kronos clocks with an online payroll tool, according to the IG report.