A Long Island Rail Road foreman took his personal detours during work hours, a new report from the MTA’s watchdog has uncovered.
The foreman frequently neglected his duties, opting instead to use his work vehicle to visit his home or socialize at a friend’s residence. This behavior was highlighted by GPS data, which showed that during part of 2024, he spent nearly 66% of his travel shifts at non-work-related locations, according to the Office of Inspector General’s findings released on Monday.
The report criticized the foreman’s conduct, stating, “His actions constituted a violation of the LIRR’s trust, exploiting the freedom afforded by his mobile job, especially when he was assigned tasks close to his home.”
In response, LIRR officials have suspended the employee without pay for 60 days, demoted him for six months, and ordered him to repay $730.
The report does not name the employee, but it indicates that since 2024, he has been responsible for managing car appearance maintainers — workers tasked with cleaning the interiors of LIRR trains — two days a week as a traveling gang foreman.
The unnamed employee in the newly released report had been assigned to work two days a week as a traveling gang foreman overseeing car appearance maintainers — who clean LIRR train interiors — starting in 2024.
He was expected to use a LIRR-owned vehicle to travel to at least two yards during those shifts, but investigators found he spent “excessive time” at other places, notably his own home, the report states.
GPS data showed the foreman had traveled home or to a friend’s house for two or three hours at a time, investigators contend.
Investigators staked out the supervisor’s home and found the LIRR vehicle parked there during times he was supposed to be working, according to the report.
When interviewed by OIG watchdogs, the worker wrongly claimed his breaks for lunch could be combined into a single hour-long marathon, the report states.
“He said he received no direction on whether he could take the vehicle home within his lunch period, ‘not that it happened a lot, but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that,’” the foreman told investigators, according to the report.
The probe came on the heels of an OIG investigation into time abuse at LIRR that found dozens of workers used cloned IDs to ditch work but still get paid — including one boss who bragged about sipping margaritas at his pool.
“This is yet another example of a Long Island Rail Road supervisor who apparently believed that the MTA’s Code of Ethics and his agency’s work rules didn’t apply to him,” said Daniel Cort, the MTA’s inspector general, in a statement about the foreman.
