An MTA signal maintainer who was among more than 1,000 TWU Local 100 workers accused of dangerously falsifying safety records will be the first prosecuted in the fraud, The Post has learned.
A sealed indictment naming the worker will be made public today in Manhattan Supreme Court, where the employee will be arraigned.
Word of the alleged fraud touched off a mad scramble among MTA brass in November to get the system’s 15,000 pieces of signal equipment properly inspected.
The MTA Inspector General’s Office is talking to another eight or nine maintainers who could also face charges, sources said.
Agents from that office recently raided another transit-worker locker room, looking for bar codes that would normally be affixed to signals alongside tracks and be scanned by a maintainer once they were inspected, according to the sources.
Some maintainers allegedly kept copies of those bar codes in locker rooms and scanned them there, falsely reporting that an inspection had been completed.
In November, The Post reported that one high-level chief, Tracy Bowdwin — the MTA’s highest-paid Signal Department supervisor, at $165,000 a year — was demoted over the scandal.