Three more highly-paid Long Island Rail Road employees have been busted collecting overtime when they weren’t actually working, the MTA’s inspector general said Thursday.
Investigators caught railroad worker Jacqueline Gardner, signal inspector Robert Kreuzer and his supervisor William Bagnasco away from their jobs on multiple occasions in 2018 while they were still collecting OT, according to an IG report.
Gardner was seen arriving at either her home or Jamaica Station — where she parked her BMW during work days — on 13 separate occasions when her time-sheet claimed she was at work collecting OT, the IG said.
Gardner was the “railway worker in charge” at Manhattan’s West Side Yard, where she was responsible for coordinating between the railroad and outside contractors doing work at the site.
The terms of her position allowed her to leave early if her work was complete, as long as she informed railroad officials — which she never did, the IG said.
Gardner raked in nearly $100,000 in OT between Jan. 1 and Nov. 7 of that same year, en route to a $226,492 in total earnings.
Kreuzer and Bagnasco, meanwhile, were both caught leaving their Garden City workplace anywhere from 40 minutes to two-and-a-half hours before their OT shifts wrapped up, the watchdog said.
Investigators tracked Kreuzer’s movements on five separate days in April and May of 2018. On one occasion, the IG’s office spotted him at one of two locations he was known to sleep, in Valley Stream, 50 minutes before he supposedly wrapped up his shift in Garden City.
Bagnasco, the supervisor responsible for approving and monitoring Kreuzer’s hours, was caught on six separate occasions, the IG said.
In two of those instances the men left work at the exact same time — 4:55 p.m. and 5:51 p.m. — even though they collected pay through 7:30 p.m., according to the IG’s office.
Kreuzer and Bagnasco collected $60,288 and $97,512, respectively, in OT over the first eight months of 2018. That year, Kreuzer took home $169,698 in total pay, and Bagnasco $249,819.
All three workers were hit with 30-day unpaid suspensions in 2019, and forced to return the money they earned at the times they were caught playing hooky. They all remain on the LIRR’s payroll, a spokeswoman said.
Kreuzer and Gardner could not be reached for comment. Reached by phone, Bagnasco denied any knowledge of the IG’s investigation.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not interested,” he said, before abruptly hanging up.
The LIRR represents just 11 percent of the MTA’s workforce, 13 percent of its operating expenses and 4 percent of its ridership. But six of 20 MTA employees penalized in 2019 as a result of the IG’s work came from the LIRR, according to the office’s annual report released Thursday.
IG Carolyn Pokorny has exposed multiple examples of LIRR workers caught collecting OT when they were at home and not working since the Empire Center exposed the railroad’s outrageous overtime spending last spring.
In response to the controversy, the MTA is in the process of putting its entire workforce on a biometric, fingerprint-based timekeeping system. As of mid-January, 89 percent of LIRR employees were enrolled in the system.
“We appreciate the IG’s work, and we want the public to know that we take these issues seriously,” LIRR President Phil Eng said in a statement. “We have tightened oversight of timekeeping including the use of biometric clocks that are currently in use across all our workforce crafts.”
