The most-common complaint about bureaucrats is that they’re lazy.
Though it’s probably more accurate to say that bureaucracies have very little incentive to care about citizens.
After all, the rest of us are captive customers, whether we’re dealing with the federal government’s postal service, a state motor vehicles department, or a local government’s education bureaucracy.
So it would be naive to expect the kind of attentiveness and hustle you find when dealing with many private merchants.
But one thing we can say is that bureaucrats aren’t sluggish when they have an opportunity to defraud taxpayers.
For instance, a report in the New York Times by Benjamin Weiser exposes a jaw-dropping overtime scam by transit bureaucrats in New York.
Thomas Caputo, a senior track worker for the Long Island Rail Road, put in for 15 hours of overtime for work he said he had done at the West Side Yard in Manhattan. His shift began at 4 p.m. and ended at 7 o’clock the next morning. But, the authorities say, Mr. Caputo was somewhere else that evening:
at a bowling alley in Patchogue, N.Y., more than 55 miles away, where he bowled three games, averaging a score of 196. He took home an overtime payment of $1,217. …Mr. Caputo, 56, who retired in 2019 after three decades with the railroad, was listed in 2018 as the highest paid M.T.A. employee with total pay of more than $461,000, including about $344,000 in overtime. …In 2018, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Thursday, Mr. Caputo claimed to have worked 3,864 overtime hours, on top of 1,682 regular hours. If he had worked every single day that year (which he did not), the complaint said, his claims would average about 10 hours of overtime each day for the entire year, beyond his regular 40-hour workweek.
But Mr. Caputo was just the tip of the iceberg.
Caputo was one of five current and former employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority charged on Thursday with participating in an overtime fraud scheme that allowed them to become among the highest-paid employees at the agency… All five defendants each earned more than the salary of the M.T.A. chairman or Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who oversees the agency.
Another bureaucrat was very creative in milking the system.
Michael Gundersen, 42, a maintenance-of-way supervisor at New York City Transit, was accused of reporting he had worked long shifts in March 2018, for which he was paid $2,481. But evidence showed that at the same time, he had hotel reservations in Atlantic City and tickets for concerts there on successive nights, a second complaint charged. During other periods that Mr. Gundersen was paid thousands of dollars for claimed overtime, he was on vacation in Williamsburg, Virginia, participating in a 5K footrace in New Jersey, and on a family vacation at a resort in the Hudson Valley.
By the way, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the M.T.A. has serious financial problems (one of the few entities to get bailout money as part of pandemic relief).
The charges come at a time when the authority is confronting its worst financial crisis because of the pandemic and a stalemate over federal aid. Without a financial bailout, the agency has said that it will have to slash subway and bus service and that more than 9,000 workers could lose their jobs. …The huge overtime payments made to Mr. Caputo and other M.T.A. employees were revealed a month earlier by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Albany. Its research showed that 33 M.T.A. employees earned more than $300,000 in 2018, with almost all receiving large amounts of overtime pay. …The charges come more than a decade after the Long Island Rail Road was caught up in a scandal over disability payments. A New York Times investigation had found that nearly every career employee who retired received a disability pension.
In other words, not only are bureaucrats overpaid in general, but they also are very adept at cheating the system to pad their paychecks.
We’ll close with by explaining that this type of scam is common with government employment.
Why? For the simple reason – as illustrated by the cartoon – that politicians are bureaucrats tend to be on the same side with negotiating new contracts.
Nobody represents the interests of taxpayers.
In any event, I’m sure we can all agree that Mr. Caputo, Mr. Gunderson, and the rest of the crooks deserve membership in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.
P.S. Here’s a new element discovered inside the bureaucracy, and a letter to the bureaucracy from someone renewing a passport.
P.P.S. And this satirical video actually does a very good job of capturing how bureaucracy actually operates.
P.P.P.S. Here’s a great top-10 list from Letterman about bureaucrats.
International Liberty 
Please rename the bureaucrat hall of fame as The Bureaucrat Hall of Shame or some equally descriptive ID. If you do and if you qualify under 501(c)3 of the IRS Code, I will make a four figure contribution.
Andrew J. Sordoni, III
45 Owen Street
Forty Fort, PA 18704
(570) 283-6202
Reblogged this on Boudica BPI Weblog.
These crooks are pikers. There was a State civilian minion who researched the purchase of an apartment building in the DF in Mexico. Recall that Mexico City is subject to frequent earthquakes but that did not deter the intrepid lady. So she decided that the best way to house the huge American staff of the Embassy was in this high rise. She belonged to a section of the State Department that lurked in the USA and rarely if ever set foot on foreign soil but whose wisdom was so great that the recommendations of the incredible intellects of State officers were all but ignored.
A princely price was paid for this poorly constructed monstrosity was rendered to the Mexican bandito. A last visit was arranged by the princess to seal the deal and secure the necessary legal papers. Once complete she handed in her resignation, to reside with her new found love in Mexico City. And the structure was a disaster. How else can one forget that State lost 8 billion under the Hildabeast. State so competent it makes the VA look Prussian in its efficiency.
Dan,
My professor Harold Demsetz at UCLA warned us against using the Nirvana approach to compare how private and government actors deliver goods & services. Analysts who praise private sector tend to exaggerate its capacity to deliver high quality goods at low prices quickly. Analysts who praise government sector tend to exaggerate the widespread benefits of providing essential “public services”, like education, vaccines, national highway system, etc. In the real world both are partially right, but ignore their easily recognizable flaws. There are low-quality, sleazy private sellers, who rely on corrupting government officials to maintain their monopoly rents. And there are lazy bureaucrats, too.
“Though it’s probably more accurate to say that bureaucracies have very little incentive to care about citizens.”
Just wait til the government takes over the coffee shop industry. All Starbucks and Caribou Coffee shops will be rebranded as “The Department of Caffeinated Beverage Distribution and Individual Pastry Snack Consumption Refilling Centers.” There will be 32 two Refilling Centers in each congressional district, no more & no less. Congress will mandate that they be self-sustaining, and they’ll operate at 23.4% of capacity for a consistent loss (i.e., tax-payer bail-out) of $3B-$4B per year. Fortunately, all diversity hiring goals will be met and employees will *never* be subject to the whims of customer expectations.
This is humorous and entertaining but there is nothing funny about the scope and scale of this problem and it’s impact on the economy and our liberty. Having done consulting, audits, and reports on various local and state government agencies for nearly three decades, these examples represent the norm rather than anomalies. The whole system needs a hard reset with a clean, streamlined operating system.
Reblogged this on boudica.us.