The MTA needs a new acronym – ATM. That is how the Maryland Transit Administration operates for who those who steal from it.
General Assembly auditors found a $475,000 discrepancy between recorded collections and bank deposits made over four months last year. We wonder what would have happened if auditors looked at the entire year – or past five years. At that rate, the agency would have been doling out $1.425 million each year fraudulently.
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According to the audit, MTA did not keep track of which employees had access to fare boxes, nor did it monitor employees while they counted money.
It’s like Transportation Secretary John Porcari is running the Discovery Channel’s “Cash Cab” – except the contestants are state employees and they don’t have to answer any questions to win money. They just take it.
The audit also found a host of other problems at the agency, including that it did not perform preventative maintenance inspections on its buses. Porcari says each issue raised in the audit is being remedied.
But the findings leave us wondering who is driving the bus over there. The audit is just the latest evidence of incompetence made public at the agency. As The Examiner reported earlier this year, passengers know fare boxes routinely fail. Some regular commuters said they rode free as often as two times per week. Given that so much money was going to thieves, it’s probably a good thing. But it means even less money was making it to the bank for the MTA, skewing the agency’s budget and forcing taxpayers to subsidize even more of its operations.
We also reported this year how bureaucratic incompetence led to missing a deadline to file a report needed to access millions of federal funds for the proposed Red Line. And a year ago we reported how MTA officials could not tell us how much fuel the agency used or how much it paid for it.
How many more audits and reports will it take for the MTA to reform? At a time of shrinking revenue, why should taxpayers be asked to subsidize an agency so careless with our money it could not be bothered to track its fares nor make sure its fare boxes work?
This audit is one more example of how when legislators and government officials say they can cut no more, they lie. For a refresher on money lost, stolen or wasted, click here for the Department of Legislative Services and check the audit archives. Every state legislator must review them before going back into session next year. They will find millions of ideas on how to trim the next state budget without affecting core services.
