NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — The MTA mistakenly paid a subway worker $79,000 in overtime pay that went unnoticed for over three years, according to a new report published Wednesday by the agency’s Inspector General.
From November 2018 to March 2019, the unnamed employee, a payroll processor in NYC Transit’s track department, received $37,021 in illegitimate "travel time" when given an hour or two of extra time for almost every shift she worked, even though such pay is granted to most NYC Transit employees for only two months after their work location is moved, the report adds.
“Wasting taxpayer money on unnecessary overtime and travel time is bad enough, but that multiple MTA supervisors provided so little oversight they actually approved it, is just plain wrong,” MTA Inspector General Carolyn Pokorny said in a statement.
A 2019 MTA probe into high overtime earners revealed that the woman’s inadvertent pay was in violation of her contract and agency policies that prohibit overtime hours for office workers.
The woman also earned $42,868 in extra pay from overtime shifts that should not have been approved by her managers from Nov. 8, 2018, through March 23, 2019, the IG’s audit found.
According to the report, the worker may have received even more unauthorized pay, but some older records the IG sought to audit were destroyed by a 2018 flood in her office.
"This investigation highlights many of the red flags for overtime reform my office continues to highlight: paper records, relying on an honor system, and lacking a clear understanding of policies and procedures," Pokorny added.
The woman will get to keep the extra earnings and was not penalized for the violations and oversight was blamed on the MTA's disorderly policies used to approve overtime pay to workers, which is supposed to be authorized by supervisors in writing, but was mostly done verbally and often rubber-stamped by managers, the report states.
Transit officials alerted the IG office of the issue in 2019 and have since introduced additional restrictions on overtime, including requiring that high-ranking superintendents approve the extra pay.
“The MTA has aggressively tackled overtime and implemented new controls to substantially increase oversight and accountability — resulting in a nearly quarter of a billion-dollar decrease since 2018 and the implementation of a five-year plan to cut overtime costs by nearly $1 billion,” MTA spokeswoman Meredith Daniels said.