Amtrak taken for a ride in wild $12M scam by 119 workers but more than half keep their jobs: probe

Amtrak got taken for a ride by 119 workers in a massive $12 million scheme — but more than half of them are still on the company payroll, an internal watchdog found.The workers ripped off Amtrak’s health plan in a kickback scam that saw them taking bribes from crooked doctors who then filed fake claims — and some employees went full mob and shook down medical providers for their cut of the cash, the company’s Office of the Inspector General said in a report released Tuesday.“The sheer volume of employees who cavalierly participated in this scheme to steal Amtrak’s funds suggests not only a serious lapse in basic ethics, but a troubling workforce culture, at least in the Northeast region, in which blatant criminal behavior was somehow normalized,” Inspector General Kevin H.Winters said.Some of the allegedly dirty workers — mostly located in the New York to DC region — even handed over their kids’ insurance information for the con that ran from 2019 to 2022, according to the OIG’s office.Yet some 61 of the scammers still work at the largely taxpayer-funded railroad, the OIG’s office said.An Amtrak spokesperson said the company is taking “swift action” to deal with all the fraudsters, adding that officials have now increased oversight and employee education to keep schemes like this from happening again.About a dozen Amtrak employees are facing criminal charges.

Seven of them have already pled guilty and are awaiting sentencing, 28 other employees retired or resigned in disgrace because of the investigation and another 30 left the company “for other reasons,” according to the OIG.The train company’s watchdog began investigating the jaw-dropping scheme after an agent noticed unusual billing patterns, according to the OIG’s office.Agents then discovered three New York health care providers with “questionable billings” and a high number of Amtrak employees as patients.An undercover agent posed as an Amtrak employee in June 2021 an...