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I don't know anything about the Washington D.C. transit system,
but I have talked to bus drivers who work for Valley Metro in the
Phoenix area and they have said some negative things about
how Valley Metro handles the coins they collect.
They told me the coins are not taken to a bank on a daily basis but rather just sit around for days, until someone gets around to depositing them in a bank. I see two problems with that. First Valley Metro is probably losing a lot of interest it could make if the money was deposited on a daily basis. Second with lax standards like that it opens up the possibility to theft from crooked employees. Just like this theft in the DC area. For those of you who are not familiar how bus systems operate they tend to lose money hand over fist, and all the money lost is generally paid by the Feds. Valley Metro, is like most Federally subsidized mass transit systems. For every dollar they collect in revenue, they lose $4. And of course that money is paid by the Feds. Coins were a clue: Ex-transit workers stole fares to play lottery By Richard Simon March 19, 2012, 3:06 p.m. Reporting from Washington— Perhaps it was the multiple bags of $500 in coins used to buy lottery tickets that tipped authorities off to the theft. Two former Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority employees pleaded guilty Monday to stealing at least $445,000 from subway fare machines in Virginia, Maryland and Washington. John Vincent Haile, 52, a former transit officer from Virginia, and Horace Dexter McDade, 58, a Maryland resident who worked as a revenue collection technician for the transit agency, pleaded guilty in federal court in Alexandria, Va., to theft concerning programs receiving federal funds and conspiring to commit money laundering, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. The men face a maximum penalty of 10 years on the theft charges and 20 years on the conspiracy charges when they are sentenced June 15. They were arrested in January after authorities observed them hiding and later retrieving bags of change from beneath an overpass. "Shortly before midnight on Jan. 18, each of these defendants was caught red-handed with $8,000 that they stole from WMATA,” Neil H. MacBride, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement. “But this was just the tip of the iceberg. Over the course of several years, these men abused the trust Metro placed in them and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from Metro and local taxpayers. They then laundered that stolen money through the Virginia Lottery system and local businesses.'' Authorities received a tip that a man driving a Jaguar and wearing a police uniform was buying lottery tickets with bags of change -- $28,000 worth of tickets in a three-month period last year, according to court records. Haile has won more than $60,000 from the Lottery since 2008, and bank records showed him with "significant unexplained cash deposit activity’’ in excess of $150,000 since 2008, according to court records. McDade laundered the proceeds of his thefts by making purchases at home improvement stores, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. Restitution will be determined at sentencing, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office said. |