An MTA employee of nearly 30 years was caught fudging his timesheets and carving time off the ends of his shifts — even though his job was to guide other MTA workers on payroll and timekeeping issues — the transit agency’s internal watchdog said on Tuesday.
An investigation by MTA Inspector General Daniel Cort found that a dispatcher assigned to New York City Transit’s Unified Timekeeping System Unit at the Baisley Park Depot in Queens committed time and attendance abuse on multiple occasions last year, leaving several hours before the end of his scheduled shift without authorization and without clocking out.
The dispatcher also changed his shift without management’s approval. In one case, he clocked in before his scheduled start time and left four hours early, and falsified sign-in and sign-out sheets in other instances, the report found.
The MTA said the employee, whom the report did not name, retired from the agency in April. But he had worked with the MTA since 1996, starting as a bus operator before becoming a dispatcher in 2005, according to the inspector general’s investigation, which said the employee didn’t answer investigators’ questions “fully and honestly.”
“This employee’s job was to advise colleagues about proper timekeeping, yet he repeatedly defrauded the MTA when it came to his own hours,” Cort said in a statement. “His supervisor’s reliance on the honor system was clearly not a best practice, and I appreciate the steps NYC Transit has taken to safeguard against this type of fraud.”
The inspector general’s report also found that the employee’s supervisor didn’t properly review timekeeping records for the UTS unit, because he relied on an “honor system,” and was unaware of the fraud.
In a statement, MTA spokesperson Michael Cortez said managers had been retrained to prevent timekeeping fraud among the agency’s dispatchers.
“This rogue employee, who is no longer with the agency, tried to steal from taxpayers instead of doing the right thing,” he said in a statement. “Management has been reinstructed on existing protocols designed to ensure this behavior does not occur again.”
Investigators recommended that NYC Transit “consider recouping” the former employee’s unearned payments and leave time, implement “better oversight” over the timekeeping unit, and review records to identify other possible time and pay discrepancies. NYC Transit agreed with those recommendations, according to the report, which noted that the agency was able to get back “certain amounts of the dispatcher’s terminal leave balance equaling six vacation days” before he retired.