Disability or Dishonesty?

To understand what it’s like to work on the railroad — the Long Island Rail Road — a good place to start is the Sunken Meadow golf course, a rolling stretch of state-owned land on Long Island Sound.

During the workweek, it is not uncommon to find retired L.I.R.R. employees, sometimes dozens of them, golfing there. A few even walk the course. Yet this is not your typical retiree outing.

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.

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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.

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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.

The answer, according to government records and dozens of interviews, stems from a combination of factors, including highly unusual L.I.R.R. contracts that allow longtime workers to retire with a pension as early as age 50, federal rules that let railroad retirees claim disability for jobs they no longer hold, and an obscure federal agency called the Railroad Retirement Board that almost never says no to a disability claim.

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Walter Kueffner is one manager who didn’t say he was disabled, even though many others around him did.

“People claimed they had back problems and carpal tunnel,” said Mr. Kueffner, a former auditor at the railroad. “I am sure some really did, but a lot of healthy people were doing it.”

Disability awards were being handed out when he started at the railroad in 1968, and the numbers “got bigger as time went on,” he said. “They don’t reject too many for a disability, you know.”

Mr. Kueffner said that while he’s not “a saint,” the thought of claiming disability never crossed his mind for one simple reason: “I didn’t have a disability,” he said. “I was doing a job that people do everywhere. I worked at a desk and I retired in good shape.”

Source: A Disability Epidemic Among a Railroad’s Retirees, New York Times, September 20, 2008