Investigation turns up massive fraud in Amtrak overtime reporting

Some excellent reporting here by Diana Stancy of The Daily Signal. I realize that when we start talking about dollars in reference to a federal agency, it's hard to know what's excessive. Amtrak pays $200 million in a single year just for overtime? Is that a lot? In the context of a $3.7 trillion federal budget? Short answer: Yes. Amtrak's entire personnel cost amounts to $1.2 billion, so you're talking about one-sixth of that in overtime. But it's when you really dig down into the reporting of hours that it becomes clear some of the employee claims that got Amtrak to that number amount to obvious fraud:

A variety of misleading documentation was visible in the audit. The Amtrak watchdog found employees often recorded more than 40 hours of work in a single day. Furthermore, employees reported 280 instances where they worked 31 days straight without any days off. One example the OIG cited was a coach cleaner, who reported working 108 days in a row. According to the audit, 81 percent of total hours worked combined regular and overtime, and 2,381 timesheets reported more than 40 overtime hours tacked on to a regular 40-hour work week. Furthermore, certain Amtrak employees only reported overtime hours, without any regular hours logged. “Some employees repeatedly reported working overtime but no regular hours, including five employees who reported at least five weeks with overtime but no regular hours,” the OIG said. For Amtrak employees, overtime hours are compensated 1.5 times to 2 times more than regular hours.

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Stancy goes on to point out that with 14 unions and 23 bargaining units representing Amtrak employees, it becomes far more difficult to get to the bottom of all this. But even with that said, you still have to wonder on a basic level how this stuff got approved by supervisors. I don't know Amtrak's basic operational structure, but who turns in a time sheet claiming to have worked 40 hours in a day and doesn't worry that they'll be called on the carpet for it? It seems to me you wouldn't dream of doing that unless you already knew the boss would look the other way, which means that management was probably in on the scam. Why would they be? I'm speculating here, but it's long been understand that government agencies come under pressure toward the end of a fiscal year to spend their entire budget so as to justify budget requests for the coming year. If you're running out of time to spend the money, one way to catch up is to start jacking up those time sheets. It's nice to see the Obama Administration hasn't succeeded in chasing away all the independent auditors - yet, anyway. Let's hope Congress takes a look at this, and goes beyond just the role of the employees, because employees aren't going to pull this kind of crap - especially on a widespread basis - without a tacit understanding that it's what management wants them to do