Disability Epidemic On The Long Island Railroad
Walt Bogdanich, Andrew W. Lehren, Robert A. McDonald and Nicholas Phillips report in The New York Times of railroad workers disabled enough to collect disability payments (stealing from taxpayers if they don't actually have a disability) but well enough to golf their days away at Sunken Meadow golf course on Long Island Sound:

These golfers are considered disabled. At an age when most people still work, they get a pension and tens of thousands of dollars in annual disability payments -- a sum roughly equal to the base salary of their old jobs. Even the golf is free, courtesy of New York State taxpayers.

With incentives like these, occupational disabilities at the L.I.R.R. have become a full-blown epidemic.

Virtually every career employee -- as many as 97 percent in one recent year -- applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees, including about 2,000 who retired during that time.

The L.I.R.R.'s disability rate suggests it is one of the nation's most dangerous places to work. Yet in four of the last five years, the railroad has won national awards for improving worker safety.

"Short of the gulag, I can't imagine any work force that would have a so-to-speak 90 percent disability attrition rate," said Glenn Scammel, long one of Capitol Hill's top experts on railroads. "That defies both logic and experience."

...And it is not just engineers, conductors or track workers seeking disability payments. Dozens of retired white-collar managers are doing it as well, including the former deputy general counsel, employment manager, claims manager and director of government and community affairs.

In fact, two formerly influential figures at the L.I.R.R. -- a married couple, one from management and one from labor -- are retired and drawing about $280,000 annually in combined disability and pension payments, according to estimates based on public records.

Railroad officials say that as far as they know, most of the disabled workers were able-bodied until their early retirement, and only then filed papers seeking occupational disability payments.

"How is it that somebody is occupationally disabled the day after he retires when he wasn't occupationally disabled the day before he retired?" asked Gary Dellaverson, chief financial officer for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the railroad's parent.

Easy. The disability is in their ethical makeup -- and in a system that makes it the status quo for the fakers to steal from us.

And don't think this is the only business or sector where this happens.