The MTA’s top honcho said Monday he’s reined in the kind of flagrant overtime fraud that led to federal charges against five agency employees last week.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman Patrick Foye called the abuse — which involved four Long Island Rail Road workers and an NYC Transit employee falsifying time sheets to bilk the agency for hundreds of thousands of dollars — “shocking” and “outrageous” during an interview on WPIX.

He also insistedthat the MTA’s sky-high overtime spending has been curtailed, pointing to cost reductions implemented over the past year, including some that occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In 2019 overtime compared to the prior year was down $92 million. In 2020 so far overtime is down $73 million,” said Foye. “Over the next three or four years we expect to cut overtime by an additional couple 100 million dollars a year.”

Those reductions bring the MTA’s overtime costs close to where they were before Foye joined the agency as president in 2017. During his first full year on that job in 2018, the MTA spent $1.3 billion in overtime, a $116 million increase from the year before.

The following year, Foye was promoted to the MTA’s top job as chairman — but it’s still not clear what more he is doing to prevent the kind of fraud that led to last week’s charges.

Manhattan federal prosecutors allege one NYC Transit worker, Michael Gundersen, filed 10 hours of overtime each day on top of his regular schedule, netting him $385,000 in pay for 2018 despite being assigned a $102,000 base salary.

Thomas Caputo, an LIRR worker charged in the sting, allegedly filed 15 hours of overtime during one shift at the railroad’s yard on Manhattan’s West Side — but was actually at a Long Island bowling alley.

Caputo, who is now retired, was paid $461,000 in 2018, $344,000 of which was overtime.

Foye and MTA officials last year inked a $24 million contract with the company Kronos to install “biometric” time clocks across the agency’s workplaces. The clocks require employees to scan their hands to check in and out of shifts, which Foye said will help crack down on fraud.

The rollout of those clocks was delayed earlier this year — and workers haven’t used the hand-scanners currently in place since the pandemic hit in the spring out of fear of sharing surfaces.

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