Duct tape time

MTA gives signal-scandal boss a promotion

By HEATHER HADDON

Not even filing fake reports about subway safety equipment can get you fired.

An NYC Transit manager who oversaw faulty subway-signal inspections 10 years ago has not only escaped punishment, he's been promoted to a senior officer in the same department, The Post has learned.

Alan Doran, 49, is a general superintendent making $125,000 a year, according to MTA payroll records.

He even got a $11,360 raise last year and now oversees several lines in Manhattan.

As The Post first reported Friday, the MTA inspector general revealed that transit supervisors falsified thousands of signal inspections across the subway system for years. The IG also documented the misdeeds in the signal department in 2000 and 2005 reports, but nothing seemed to change.

While in the lower position of superintendent, Doran oversaw NYC Transit's 14th Street signal shop, which is partly responsible for thousands of pieces of equipment on the A, B, C, D, E, F and G train lines and the Brooklyn portion of the R line.

The 2000 IG report, which focused on the 14th Street shop, found it didn't do half of the mandatory backup inspections on the safety equipment in 1999.

Doran instructed several supervisors to conduct only visual inspections "at the sacrifice of other scheduled signal tests," the report found.

After that report came out, Doran was transferred to the Brooklyn signal shop, according to transit sources.

But he has since risen to the position of general superintendent and is now a high-ranking official -- back at the 14th Street shop, sources said.

Furthermore, six other maintenance supervisors are still on the job even though they were caught in 2000 reporting that they inspected hundreds of signals and other safety equipment while they were on vacation or their days off, the IG found.

As a result of the 2000 report, NYC Transit brass ordered managers to have inspectors put bar codes on the signals to ensure they would inspect them with a scanner. But a 2005 follow-up report revealed that inspectors simply photocopied the bar codes and scanned the duplicates.

Efforts to reach Doran were unsuccessful. There was no immediate response from the MTA.

The inspections help ensure that tracks don't have faulty wiring that could trigger false green signals, which could cause a train collision.

But the IG investigation found that, under pressure to keep up with federal standards, managers simply faked that the work had been done.

The fudged reports happened across the system, the investigators found.

"We were pressured by the foreman. Your job is on the line," said one signal maintainer, who worked in a different division but said that they also had fake inspections.

Workers either wrote in signal logbooks that they had made inspections that they hadn't, or superintendents logged into computers as them and recorded the fudged information, signal maintainers said.