5 MTA Employees Accused Of Massive Overtime Scam, Feds Say

Updated Friday at 9:09 a.m.

NEW YORK CITY — A Long Island Rail Road worker claimed 10 hours a day of overtime, earning $344,000 extra pay, while he actually went bowling.

Another MTA worker raked in more than $200,000 in overtime while, for at least part of the time, he went on vacation or to concerts.

Those are among the accusations levied against five MTA employees, who face federal criminal charges, as first detailed by the New York Daily News.

“These defendants, senior LIRR and New York City Transit employees, allegedly made themselves some of the highest-paid employees at the entire MTA by claiming extraordinary, almost physically impossible, amounts of overtime,” said Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss, in a statement.

LIRR workers Thomas Caputo, 56, of Holbrook was named in a pair of federal complaints, along with Joseph Ruzzo, 56, of Levittown; John Nugent, 50, of Rocky Point; and Joseph Balestra, 51, of Blue Point, and NYC Transit worker Michael Gunderson, 42, of Manalapan, New Jersey.

The complaints detail how the employees claimed exorbitant amounts of overtime. Caputo, for example, claimed to have worked nearly 3,900 overtime hours in 2018.

"That is, if CAPUTO had worked every single calendar day in 2018 including weekends and holidays (although he did not), that would average out to approximately 10 hours of overtime every day for an entire year in addition to his regular, 40-hour work week," the complaint states.

All the workers face a charge of federal program fraud, which carries up to 10 years in prison if they're convicted.

The accusations against the employees is an "egregious betrayal of public trust," said MTA spokesperson Tim Minton, in a statement thanking authorities — which included the MTA Inspector General — for the probe.

"The MTA has implemented a number of aggressive overtime controls that substantially increase oversight and accountability -- already resulting in a reduction of $105 million in overtime in 2019 alone and the implementation of a five-year plan to cut overtime costs by nearly $1 billion," Minton said. "We will continue to root out waste, fraud and abuse wherever it occurs and will continue cooperating fully with this critically important investigation."