Changes can recover LIRR's Lost & Found
The lost and found shelves at the Long Island Rail Road at Penn Station. Credit: MTA Inspector General's Office
Just once it would be so awesome for someone to do an investigation of a Long Island Rail Road department or service and discover that it's shockingly good . . . or even just reasonably secure and competent. Once again, though, no such luck.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority's inspector general, the agency's internal watchdog, has released an audit of the LIRR's Lost & Found operations. It's a disaster: disorganized, careless, not secure and run in violation of its own stated rules and practices.
The LIRR's Lost & Found office logged some 15,000 items in 2013, according to the audit. Prompted to locate 20 of the items as part of the IG's review last year, the railroad failed to find eight of them. Meanwhile, valuable items like passports and jewelry are left unsecured in areas with no video surveillance. Cheap items are often kept much longer than the required 90 days, but 42.9 percent of expensive items, which the LIRR should hold onto for 180 days in case they are claimed, were sold before the deadline had passed.
The audit also turned up some success stories of people who had lost items returned, but those should be the norm, not a welcome exception. The LIRR says it will adopt the recommendations in the audit, of installing security cameras in some areas, banning unauthorized employees near the items and keeping certain more valuable stuff under lock and key. That sounds reasonable. In fact, it sounds like common sense.
Which makes us wonder why it took a negative audit to get such obvious precautions in place.
