Gravy train chugs along

MTA still ripe for OT abuse

The MTA’s antiquated OT system continues to work overtime for cashgrab scams, with the agency’s $31 million effort to curtail potential payroll pilfering “at risk,” according to the agency’s inspector general.

The bid to prevent overtime abuse is failing as officials slow-roll the integration of modern timekeeping into the authority’s payroll systems, the IG’s latest quarterly review of the program’s progress states.

Inspector General Carolyn Pokorny’s office said “shifts in organizational priorities” have left the multiyear effort in limbo — even as MTA employees rack up indictments for stealing time under a decades-old paper-dependent “honor system” for OT.

The challenge is “surmountable,” the IG said in the report, if the MTA’s new leadership under Gov. Hochul cares to fix it.

“If management plans to abandon the effort this far into the project, then it should be transparent about that decision,” the report said.

Pokorny’s office has been keeping tabs on the MTA’s overtime reforms since 2019, when The Post exposed allegations of OT abuse following a series of exposés on Long Island Rail Road workers pulling in huge paychecks.

Many of the MTA’s supervisors “relied entirely on the honesty of employees” in doling out OT — creating an “honor system” rife with opportunities for fraud, Pokorny has said.

That unsupervised collection of OT wages also has resulted in multiple prosecutions — including of 2018 “Overtime King” Thomas Caputo, an LIRR employee who the feds said conspired with co-workers to land jobs on megaprojects where they could get away with sleeping or playing hooky out of view of railroad management.

The MTA, under previous Chairman Pat Foye, hired Morrison & Foerster LLP in 2019 to develop a plan to prevent and catch fraud in the future. The firm urged officials to scrap paper-based OT accounting for “biometric” Kronos clocks that require workers to swipe in and out of work, and scan their fingerprints when they do so.

But MTA leaders have waived the fingerprint requirement since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the IG. Meanwhile, Kronos participation declined in the third quarter of 2021 compared with earlier in the year, the report said.

Until Kronos and payroll are fully integrated and digitized, management will lack key tools to verify OT wages and catch cheaters, according to the IG.

The MTA noted that OT spending has decreased since 2018.

“Measures already implemented have resulted in annual overtime expenditures dropping by hundreds of millions of dollars and we are committed to additional material reductions in overtime costs,” spokesman Mike Cortez said in a statement.