BART Audit Flags Overtime Costs, Weak Controls as Agency Spends $96 Million

Rigid union rules. Persistent staffing gaps. Outdated timekeeping systems.

Those are among the factors BART’s inspector general pointed to in explaining why the transit agency continues to spend a growing share of its budget on overtime.

According to the watchdog office’s recently published report, overtime accounted for 14% of BART’s budget last year, with 57 employees doubling their base salaries through extra hours. While the trend dipped slightly last year, the report showed spending escalated from 2021 to 2023, when the agency paid about $96 million in overtime.

“Overtime is gonna happen — you can’t run BART without overtime,” Inspector General Claudette Biemeret told the Board of Directors on Wednesday. “But at the end of the fiscal year, you wanna have your costs pretty close to what your budget was and not having these huge variances.”

BART staff said the pandemic played a large role in the staffing shortages. In 2021 alone, the agency lost 567 employees, 287 of whom retired after an incentive program was approved by the board. Others left after the agency implemented a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Since then, however, BART has steadily hired, growing its workforce by 11.5%.

Still, overtime spending grew through 2023.

Biemeret said her office tried to identify the root causes but struggled to access key information in BART’s timekeeping system. Employees are required to file timesheets with overtime codes.

“But there is one field that [is] just a basic comment field — it’s freeform — you can type whatever you want in it, where people might put in the reason why they worked overtime,” she said. “Someone called out sick, there was an emergency, there was some sort of unexpected problem, whatever that may be. We could not get that information out of the system.”

Later in Wednesday’s meeting, BART’s Chief Financial Officer Joseph Beach contradicted Biemeret.

“Actually, we do have that information available that can come out of the system,” he said. “It’s just data in the system; there should be no reason we shouldn’t get that for you.”

Biemeret said it was a surprise to hear that, since her staff had worked extensively to obtain the data, but were told it was inaccessible.

The report recommended several reforms, including stronger data collection, tighter overtime approval controls and better anti-fraud tools.

Although the audit did not uncover fraud, Biemeret said BART’s current data collection system was not robust enough to detect inconsistencies or red flags.

During public comment, SEIU 1021 President John Arantes, who represents 1,700 BART employees, blasted the report as “totally slanderous” to workers.

“If you gave us enough [of a] raise to live in the Bay Area, we [would] not need to work overtime,” he said. “We are not slaves or indentured servants. We have rights. We work overtime, and you shall pay us for the work that we do.”

Biemeret and board members stressed the audit was not to determine whether overtime should be allowed or paid, but rather to help BART manage costs.

The board instructed staff to begin implementing some recommendations while the inspector general’s office continues its review.

Clarification: A photo in a Sept. 25 story about a BART audit was miscaptioned. The image showed SFMTA employees assisting passengers at the 24th Street BART station on Sept. 5, not BART employees as originally stated.