Those damn unions!
"FBI: Hundreds of NY rail workers part of $1B fraud" by Larry Neumeister, Associated Press / October 27, 2011
NEW YORK—Hundreds of Long Island Rail Road employees may have cheated their way to big pensions through a $1 billion fraud by paying off doctors to say they were unable to work, authorities said Thursday as they revealed that some supposedly disabled retirees were spotted regularly playing tennis and golf, shoveling heavy snow and working out for hours at a gym.
Eleven people, including two orthopedists and a former union official, have been charged with conspiracy in a decadelong fraud that authorities say poisoned the pension system used by employees of the nation's largest commuter railroad.
As you ride the AmeriKan media rails just forget about the mortgage-backed securities fraud that pensions invested in and the fraudulent foreclosure, nay, illegal seizure of homes. FBI investigating that?
Janice Fedarcyk, the head of New York's FBI office, called it a "game where every retiree was a winner." U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said the disability pension program was not designed to be "a feeding trough for the truly dishonest," but authorities say that's what happened.
Does the Long Island train go directly to Wall Street?
Hundreds of LIRR employees falsely declared themselves disabled to collect more pension money from the ages of 50 to 65, when they would otherwise qualify for full benefits, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Sad to say it, but this kind of behavior seems endemic across AmeriKa regardless of state or political parties.
The complaint said a retired engineering manager who complained of severe hand, knee, shoulder and back pain often played tennis and golf while collecting about $105,000 yearly in combined pension and disability payments.
Well, with all that tennis and golf....
Another former employee said she suffered neck, shoulder and hand pain from computer work and couldn't stand more than five minutes without leg pain. She was "surveilled shoveling heavy snow for approximately one and a half hours," the complaint said. She gets about $108,000 a year in combined pension and disability payments.
About the same amount of surveillance I give each day to a certain shoveler of s***.
The complaint said many workers who retired with disability benefits worked unusually high amounts of overtime in the five years before retirement because pensions are calculated based on earnings during that period. The heavy workloads often continued "right up until the very day when they and their physicians claimed they were utterly unable to continue doing their railroad jobs," the complaint said....
The complaint said unscrupulous employees lie about their physical condition so they can retire at an earlier age with a salary almost equal to what they got when they were working....
Same with war-promoting newspapers.
The complaint also seemed to place some of the blame for the scandal on the pension system itself....
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