An MTA board member torched Lengthy Island Rail Street management Wednesday for not firing dozens of employees caught in a brazen scheme to pad their hours.
Board member James O’Donnell skewered LIRR president Rob Free after studying in media studies that dozens of accused scammers nonetheless had jobs after they have been outed in a rip-off that noticed phony ID playing cards used to receives a commission when workers weren’t working.
A few of the alleged con artists had reportedly been raking in mounds of time beyond regulation earlier than they have been busted, he stated.
“To me, these individuals will proceed to reap the advantages of their habits,” O’Donnell fumed of the alleged scheme, which was uncovered in a scathing report from MTA Inspector Common Daniel Court docket.
“That’s unconscionable.”
Court docket known as for the IG to temporary the board in particular person, as he revealed he solely heard concerning the employees nonetheless being on the job in native information studies.
“This was lots of and lots of of hundreds of {dollars} that was stolen proper underneath our noses,” he stated.
“I’m bored with simply studying about this within the newspaper secondhand — so I would really like the inspector normal to come back in and temporary the whole board on the whole investigation,” he demanded.
The alleged scheme concerned employees utilizing machines to clone playing cards — with some brazen fraudsters creating the phony badges in a locker room and inside private automobiles on LIRR property, the report discovered.
Staff then bought the faux playing cards — a lot of which have been stashed in unlocked lockers and even a fridge on an LIRR property — for as a lot as $40, the IG stated.
The IDs have been then used so the employees could possibly be paid whereas offsite, with one freeloading worker supposedly even working one other job on the LIRR’s dime, in keeping with the report.
A number of of the implicated workers have been even among the many LIRR’s high time beyond regulation earners, pulling in as much as almost triple the OT of their trustworthy colleagues — together with one foreman who made greater than the railroad’s personal president final yr, in keeping with Newsday.
President Free tried to dispel the hostility and insisted the railroad is working via disciplinary proceedings, explaining that’s the reason a majority of the workers haven’t but been fired or punished.
Free stated that of the 36 employees concerned within the rip-off, 13 of them had give up earlier than the investigation formally began.
One worker has since been fired and 6 workers are having hearings, he added.
Regardless of the inspector normal referring the case to a number of district attorneys, no prison costs have been filed, largely as a result of the LIRR had no cameras or biometric logs to show who swiped what card when, prosecutors defined.
However O’Donnell demanded repercussions be handed down from the MTA no matter prison costs.
Janno Lieber, CEO of the MTA, assured O’Donnell the board would quickly get the inner briefing on the investigation he requested.
“We’re going to have that briefing,” he stated.
“However the disciplinary course of has to expire for the company to take any motion.”
