Give ’em an inch, and they’ll take a mile.
That appears to be the case in Chicago, where for decades the Transit Authority has been misreporting the mileage for its bus routes, thereby boosting the amount of federal taxpayer subsidies by as much as $150 million — and now, it seems, with Uncle Sam’s blessing.
Taxpayer advocate Cause of Action said a practice by the nation’s third-largest transit authority of counting “deadhead,” or empty bus travel, when it reports mileage to the federal agency that doles out subsidies continued from 1982 to earlier this year, despite a 2007 state audit that uncovered the irregularity. Although that audit put the “impact” of the misreporting as high as $5 million a year, the Federal Transit Administration, which ordered the CTA to stop the practice earlier this year, believes the amount is much lower —
between $21 million and $24 million — and is not planning to recoup the money.“CTA has used the same reporting methodology for nearly 30 years.”
“The Federal Transit Administration’s review of the Chicago Transit Authority concluded that CTA had not properly reported vehicle revenue miles – just one of 21 factors in determining formula funding,” FTA spokesman Brian Farber told FoxNews.com. “The FTA demanded that the CTA correct its reporting methodology going forward.”
But there will be no penalty, Farber said, because “FTA has no indication that the CTA used any of the formula funds for anything other than eligible purposes to provide needed transit services to the public.”
After learning of the FTA’s directive, Cause of Action made a Freedom of Information Act request for results of the 5-year-old, state-ordered audit, which indicated the practice had been going on long before the FTA put a stop to it. The auditor who was commissioned by the state to conduct that probe, Thomas Rubin, said the full amount of money the CTA overcharged cannot be precisely determined.
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