This certainly isn’t the kind of news you want to see if you’re a public transportation service that is running out of money and about to push for higher taxes on local residents. The Inspector General who oversees the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system has identified employees who were clocking in for overtime and then not showing up for work.
In the most flagrant example, surveillance by the BART police department found that a technician for the system’s automatic fare collection system improperly clocked in for 106 hours across 18 days in 2023, totaling more than $9,000 in falsely billed wages and benefits.
The $9,000 is petty change compared to what this employee seems to have stolen in total.
[Alan] Boie earned $253,000 in total compensation in 2022 and around $140,000 in 2023, up to the date of his resignation in October. Boie’s $253,380 in total pay and benefits in 2022 was 147% higher than his base salary of $102,424, according to Transparent California, a database of public employee salaries.
In Boie’s case, his theft was referred to the DA’s office and a warrant has been issued for his arrest on felony charges. Two other individuals caught in similar “time theft” schemes confessed before police were notified. It’s not clear from the story if they were fired or are still working for BART.
But this sort of scheme is not a first at BART. Last year the IG turned in a similar investigation on someone named Timothy Edwards. Edwards had a base salary of $117,000 but in 2022 he made $341,000.
The IG’s investigation found that Edwards would generally clock in near his work location, spend most of his shift away from the job site, and go to a BART station near his home in Pleasanton to clock out. Other times, he would clock in and out of the site near his home regardless of whether he reported to work or not.
The investigation also found that Edwards’ manager would also help make adjustments in the timekeeping system and may have been complicit in the misconduct.
The all-time champ for this sort of fraud may be Liang Zhao Zhang, a BART janitor who was making $57,945 as a janitor. But in 2015 he earned $162,050 in overtime pay. How did he manage this? According to records he worked between 8 and 17 hours every single day in 2015. Between 2012 and 2015 he earned just over $700,000 in overtime pay.
Zhang’s supervisors defended him as a hard worker but when the local news channel looked at video recordings they found Zhang was spending a lot of time inside a janitorial closet.
On the first day that 2 Investigates logged, Zhang appears to go into the closet twice, for 54 minutes and 90 minutes respectively. On the second day of video, he spends 90 minutes in the closet in the afternoon, and another 78 minutes behind the door later that evening.
A BART spokesperson said she cannot be certain that Zhang is the janitor pictured in one of the video clips, but that in other instances it is “obvious.” She said the janitors may be cleaning, repairing equipment, or taking breaks in that closet, but the agency does not track breaks. Earlier, though, Aguilera had said the closet is not a break room and employees eat their lunches in a separate room in a different part of the station. But he wouldn’t allow 2 Investigates to see inside the closet.
I worked for the federal government for 11 years so I can tell you that less extreme forms of this are extremely common among government employees. Some employees would clock in and then read the newspaper for half an hour before doing any work. Others would routinely disappear for long lunches that lasted 90 minutes or more. Supervisors knew this was happening but it was ignored unless it became really egregious, i.e. someone disappearing for multiple hours while on the clock. But that did happen occasionally as well.
But again, it’s a very bad look for an agency in the process of seeking millions of dollars from the taxpayers. BART’s Inspector General told the SF Standard, “when you have the people unwilling to support public funding needs because they hear about stuff like this, it’s really damaging.”