More than two years after the New Jersey State Comptroller’s Office found that the New Jersey Turnpike Authority wasted $43 million, Comptroller Matthew Boxer says the organization has made positive changes. He told NJ Today Senior Correspondent Desirée Taylor that although the Turnpike Authority has made significant improvements, his office will continue to monitor the situation and make sure the recommendations are fully implemented.
Boxer said the 2010 audit of the Turnpike Authority uncovered “some of the more egregious findings of any of the audits that we recently conducted.” He explained that the audit found the Authority was paying its employees a series of unwarranted bonuses. “They were paying both separation bonuses and retention bonuses. So they were paying employees to stay and they were paying employees to go,” he said. “They were giving their employees annual cash-outs for unused sick time and the like and as a result they had wasted a significant amount of toll money.”
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In addition, Boxer said employees got free E-ZPass usage and bonuses for snow removal even if they were receiving overtime. He also said the organization was wasteful its health care. “We compared their health plan to the state health benefits plan that they’re eligible to participate in but had chosen not to,” he said. “And we found that they had wasted literally in the area of $10 million over recent years by declining to participate in the state plan and instead providing their employees what we believe to be Cadillac type benefits that were being paid by toll dollars.”
Boxer said the Turnpike Authority has implemented recommendations since the audit. “Those bonus plans that I talked about before, those have been ended for just about all of their employees other than the employees who are still in the same collective bargaining agreement that previously existed,” he said. “They’ve gotta wait for that agreement to expire and then they’ll change the terms in those new agreements as well.”
One of the areas that Boxer said will require continued oversight is the compensation for top officials. “They’ve taken away the bonus payments for their top officials, but we had further recommended that they institute a cap for those officials because we found that many of those officials were getting payments well beyond their salary, beyond even the salary of the commissioner of the state’s Department of Transportation and in some cases beyond the salary of the governor,” he said. “And so we recommended implementation of a cap on that money, even aside from ending all of the underlying bonus payments. That cap is still a work in progress at the Authority.”
Boxer said his office will follow the situation closely and make sure the Turnpike Authority implements that recommendation. “They had hired a company to come in and do a salary analysis for them to determine where to set the cap. That analysis was recently completed and they tell us that they’ll now move forward on those compensation limits,” he said. “We’ll keep on them on that issue.”