ATLANTA — MARTA is asking a judge to force a now former employee to return more than a half a million dollars it mistakenly paid the worker.
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The transit agency says it has spent the last 5 months trying to get the money back.
“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I kept it,” MARTA rider Shannon Holmes told Channel 2’s Tom Jones.
Others also said there’s no way they would keep more than a half a million dollars their job mistakenly paid them.
“I would give it back because then I would be on the good side right. It’s like a moral. A moral thing,” one woman said.
But MARTA says a now former employee didn’t do that. It says a clerical error led to the janitor receiving $620,000in overtime pay back in April.
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The transit agency says the employee has yet to return the money. It filed a civil lawsuit to recoup the funds.
Jones reached MARTA board member Valencia Williamson by phone.
She said she didn’t have a comment other than to say, “The community needs to understand that we’ve entrusted leadership of MARTA to handle it appropriately as they see fit, and they’ve shared how they are handling the issue.”
“I mean we get calls like this fairly regularly,” Employment Attorney Andrew Coffman said.
But Coffman says while his office routinely gets calls from workers whose jobs mistakenly overpaid them, he hasn’t had an overpayment this large. Coffman says Georgia law is on MARTA’s side.
“If someone receives an overpayment like that, they have to return it,” Coffman said.
Shannon Holmes says she would do just that -- return it.
“It would have been on my conscience for the rest of my life,” Holmes said. I would have been looking over my back saying ooh when they coming to get me for that.”
Attorney Coffman doesn’t see this as a criminal issue since MARTA sent the worker the money.
MARTA says the janitor and another worker involved in the clerical error no longer work for the transit agency.
It says it has re-trained staff and strengthened it processes to prevent this from happening again
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