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No line of work is safe from “bad apples” like the five current or former MTA employees accused of defrauding the agency of thousands of dollars in overtime, Governor Andrew Cuomo insisted Thursday.
Cuomo weighed in on the scandal during an unrelated Albany press briefing that took place hours after MTA’s ‘overtime king’ Thomas Caputo and four other current and former agency workers were accused of ‘having billed massive amounts of occupational therapy when they were supposed to bowling, on vacation or otherwise easy.
“I think there are bad apples in every line of work,” Cuomo said. “You’re going to have people taking advantage of the system.
“I was the attorney general of this state,” he continued. “There are bad bankers, there are bad brokers, there are bad doctors, there are bad university presidents.”
Caputo and his four co-defendants are said to have each racked up north of $ 240,000 in overtime in 2018, ranking at or near the top of the state-run MTA payroll – and easily exceeding state pay. $ 179,500 that Cuomo received that year.
After reporting to tax watch group the Empire Center in 2019 that MTA’s OT tab had increased from $ 849 million in 2014 to $ 1.4 billion in 2018, the agency’s inspector general found that many supervisors relied on an “honor system” to record employee hours.
In response, transit officials have pledged to deploy fingerprint clocks to track workers’ hours, although the effort has stalled during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Agency records show overtime spending declined by about $ 200 million from 2018.
The governor said Thursday that the MTA needed increased oversight and restrictions to make the scams harder to succeed.
“You have to have a system in place that can catch the person who commits fraud,” he said. “Locks keep honest people honest. Have a system in place where if someone cheats the system, you catch them! “
But Cuomo said anyone who wants to play badly enough with the system will find a way.
“You will never eradicate all the bad actors in any system,” he said. “You’re always going to have bad apples.”
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