Crime & Law
CTA Paid Some Employees $1M for Remote Work They Could Not Complete, Watchdog Report Finds
A CTA Purple Line train is pictured in a file photo. (Albert Pego / iStock)
The Chicago Transit Authority has paid out more than $1 million over the past five years to vault operations employees for remote work, despite the fact that their work cannot be done remotely, a new watchdog report has found.
The state of Illinois’ Executive Ethics Commission on Wednesday published a series of inspector general reports, including one centered on CTA “time abuse,” which revealed some employees had been getting paid to complete no work.
“Giving away over a million dollars is significant waste, but it is equally concerning that multiple managers knew this was taking place,” the Office of Executive Inspector General (OEIG) report states.
A CTA spokesperson said the agency took “immediate action” once it was notified of the issue and “fully cooperated” with the OEIG investigation, agreeing to implement “all the resulting recommendations to strengthen its policies and practices.”
“The issues raised in the report were limited to a very small group of 10 individuals out of the CTA’s 11,400 employees,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The employees found to have mismanaged this group no longer work at the CTA.”
The OEIG’s findings came out of an investigation that initially centered on unauthorized personnel being allowed to enter certain secure CTA facilities. As part of that examination, investigators requested attendance and payroll records for the CTA’s vault operations employees, as well as documentation from the CTA regarding remote work and hybrid schedules.
In speaking with former CTA money handlers — who are tasked with verifying and processing money that comes in from different parts of the CTA’s transportation system — the OEIG discovered that during the COVID-19 pandemic, some handlers were able to work from home multiple days each week, the report states.
The OEIG found that CTA time records showed that beginning in July 2020, the money handlers only came in to the office two days a week. This was expanded to three days each week in May 2021 — a policy that the OEIG found remains in place to the present day, more than three years after the CTA’s official return-to-office date in May 2022.
However, as one former employee told investigators in the report, there was “nothing for us to do at home,” as the money handlers’ main tasks were to process money, “and we couldn’t take the money home.”
“(One former employee) commented that he remembered sitting at home during this time thinking about how overrated retirement is,” the report states.
Despite only coming into the office three days a week, and completing no work on the other two days, those employees continued to be paid for five days of work each week, investigators found.
In all, the OEIG found that 10 CTA employees were paid a total of $1,129,299.12 for 31,467 hours of remote work between March 2020 and February 2025. Six of those employees have since retired, according to the report.
“Multiple documents and interviews confirmed that the Vault Operations employees could not perform any of their duties remotely even though the Telework Policy required work duties to be able to be conducted from home — a generally reasonable requirement in return for a paycheck,” the report states. “For some reason, CTA managers did not feel compelled to make Vault Operations follow this policy, which resulted in the CTA paying over a million dollars, collectively, for these employees to stay home and not work. The OEIG believes this is a considerable and unnecessary waste of CTA funds.”
Despite finding documents and emails showing that this was going on, the OEIG said high-level CTA employees took no action to reduce or stop such waste.
As ridership increased following the pandemic, the CTA in January 2023 felt more work was needed from the money handlers, the report states, and their in-person workload was increased to four days a week. But one CTA employee told investigators that after just three weeks of this arrangement, they were instructed to return the money handlers to their previous three-day-a-week in-person schedule.
The OEIG called this a “baffling and unexplained” schedule, which was allowed to continue for an additional two years.
As a result of its investigation, the OEIG found reasonable cause to believe three specific CTA employees “engaged in mismanagement,” though all three — whose names were redacted from the report — have already resigned or retired from the transit authority.
The OEIG recommended the CTA investigate further to determine if any other management employees were aware of this arrangement and review its remote work policies and practices to make sure no other employees are being paid not to work.
