”This is about stealing. This is about fraud. This is about people saying they work and charging the taxpayers when they didn’t work. It’s stealing. It’s criminal,” the governor said during a news conference at his midtown Manhattan office. “So this has nothing to do with overtime. It has to do with theft and fraud, and that’s criminal.”
Cuomo said the Metropolitan Transportation Authority approved overtime hours for workers but “we never authorized fraud and theft and criminality.”
He went on to question why MTA management did not step in and put an end to the practice of billing for excessive overtime costs.
”This is not a new issue for the MTA. They have been criticized for years on lack of an effective time and attendance system. Why didn’t they change it? Why didn’t they fix it? There’s no excuse in my opinion,” Cuomo said, adding he agreed with MTA chairman Patrick Foye for the need to appoint an independent investigator.
”Find out, A, to the extent they can, how widespread the fraud, or possible fraud, is, and B, explain to the MTA what management system has failed that has allowed this to go on and didn’t catch it,” he said.
John Samuelsen, the president of the Transport Workers Union, pushed back at Cuomo’s comments.
“Of course, I support and honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. There is no systemic abuse or criminality [in overtime],” he said, adding that it’s a “smokescreen about a problem that doesn’t exist.”
Instead, Samuelsen called for an investigation into the MTA’s hiring of outside consultants, claiming that $2.1 billion has been wasted on them.
“They flushed money down the toilet on politically connected outside consults … who are feeding on the trough of public money,” he said.
Foye has called for cracking down on soaring overtime costs at the transportation agency in 2018 after The Post reported on how some employees put in for eyebrow-raising hours.
Recently retired LIRR employee Thomas Caputo claimed he worked an additional 3,864 hours to rake in $344,147 in overtime pay in 2018 for a grand paycheck of $461,646, according to the Empire Center.
Another LIRR worker, Marco Pazmino, put in for 4,157 overtime hours, quadrupling his $55,000 yearly salary.
Отсюда
В наше метро вкачиваются миллиарды, цена на проезд растет (последний раз подняли стоимость проездных пару недель назад), сервис отвратительный, а система требует все больше денег! Губернатор тут вскрыл гнойник, заявив, что профсоюзы на сверхурочных просто разворовывают бюджет. Ну и назвал это воровством и мошенничеством. Ему в ответ профсоюзы заявили, что "внешние консультанты", которых нанимают дружки самого губернатора, стоят системе более двух миллиардов. А сверхурочные обходятся около миллиарда долларов (!!!) в год. Причем доходит до курьезов, когда один перец записал себе 3864 сверхурочных часов - это 161 день кркглосуточной работы - помимо обычных часов - и заработал в год почти полмиллиона баксов. Думаю, там воруют все - от самого днища до самого верха, а оплачивает потребитель - то есть жители города.