KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Six Kansas City, Missouri, public works employees have been charged with lying about damaged road signs so they could be called in on overtime to fix them.
The U.S. Attorney's Office said in a news release that a 13-count indictment was unsealed Thursday in the nearly three-year-old, $58,000 overtime fraud conspiracy. The unsealing followed the arrest of 36-year-old Prentis Rayford, 47-year-old Eric McKamey, 61-year-old Paul Myers, 47-year-old Edward Lee Ellingburg, 33-year-old Kenneth Gethers and 49-year-old Julio Prospero.
The indictment alleges that the workers made false reports and enlisted the help of friends and relatives to call in damaged signs between January 2013 and November 2016. Suspicious managers began going to the scene and photographing signs that weren't busted in the summer of 2016.
An internal investigation found that that between August and November 2016, 75 percent of the callouts were found to be fraudulent.
Managers also tracked the GPS on work trucks and found that the vehicles often didn't go to the locations of the allegedly downed signs. The employees also allegedly submitted timesheets for work on signs that were actually damaged but fixed during normal work hours.
