MTA Inspector General: Metro-North Doesn't Track Performance of Work Crews

By LANNING TALIAFERRO (Patch Staff)

Metro-North’s Communications Field Systems work crews are virtually unsupervised, and no one tracks what they do or what equipment is being repaired—or not, according to the MTA’s Office of the Inspector General.

Moreover, this isn’t new: The MTA’s Auditor General brought these problems to Metro-North’s attention in 2001.

In a letter Dec. 23, 2014, Inspector General Barry L. Kluger spelled out his office’s most recent findings:

The Communications department still does not have an inventory of its equipment, nor are there repair records. Its supervisors still do not track the performance of their crews and there are no written records of the work. Assignments are still made verbally, and crews still do not have to log their activities or document their work.

“In fact, there is no indication that Communications management, by way of response to this situation, subsequently took any action to insure even minimal accountability by requiring that workers log their assignments and the tasks that they accomplished each workday,” Kluger wrote in the letter to Joseph Giulietti, the president of MTA Metro-North.

“That these serious deficiences have persisted or re-emerged without correction is troubling,” he wrote.

Metro-North officials released a statement today on the report:

Metro-North accepts the findings of the Inspector General and is working actively to develop a computer-based system of record keeping to better track the tasks assigned and tasks completed by the people who maintain all aspects of the railroad’s infrastructure from power to signals to track to stations. All our cars and trucks were outfitted last summer with GPS tracking devices and the data they generate is audited randomly. This information ultimately will be integrated with the work flow database to maximize the way we assign and perform maintenance tasks. In addition, Metro-North, along with all MTA agencies, is developing a lifecycle management system for all assets to improve decision making and stretch scare resources.

The letter has become the subject of numerous news stories in the past few days.

Read the New York Post: Inspector General report comes down hard on Metro-North

Read the Inspector General’s letter here.