Massachusetts taxpayers are rightfully furious. A bombshell investigation by Boston 25 News has exposed a systemic pattern of overtime fraud at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and the fallout is hitting hard. Seven MassDOT employees are now on administrative leave, Governor Maura Healey is promising prosecutions, and the state is scrambling to clean up a mess that reeks of the kind of government waste that makes your blood boil.
Here’s what went down, and why this matters to every Massachusetts resident footing the bill.
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The Investigation: 231 Days of Undercover Surveillance
Boston 25 News didn’t stumble onto this story. They spent 231 days — nearly eight months — conducting an undercover surveillance operation at the MassDOT District Six facility in Charlestown. What they found was damning: a pattern of workers submitting timesheets that don’t match reality.
The investigation used simple but effective tactics: monitoring when vehicles left the facility and comparing departure times to the hours workers claimed on legally binding timecards. The math should have been straightforward. It wasn’t.
According to publicly available payroll data from the Massachusetts Office of the Comptroller, one top earner — Zachary Fuller — pulled in a base salary of roughly $84,000 in 2025. With overtime billed at time-and-a-half, his total compensation ballooned to $240,000. That’s nearly three times his base pay, all from overtime work.
The earnings were so extraordinary that even Fuller’s social media picked up on the oddity. On a 2021 Facebook post, someone asked him how he was making over $214,000 a year. The message: something didn’t add up.
The Numbers Don’t Lie — But the Timecards Do
At least half of Massachusetts’ highest-earning highway maintenance workers are concentrated at the Charlestown yard. That alone should have triggered internal red flags. Instead, supervisors kept approving overtime requests without meaningful scrutiny.
Here’s where the surveillance footage tells the real story:
- Zachary Fuller: Claimed overtime until 3:30 p.m. on multiple days. Boston 25 watched his GMC pickup leave the facility at 11:49 a.m., 11:03 a.m., and 11:24 a.m. His timesheets listed tasks like “weed wacking” and “pouring a bench pad.” If he was doing those jobs, he wasn’t doing them while off the clock.
- Dana Bell: Racked up $228,000 in compensation in 2025, with $137,000 from overtime alone. Bell claimed to be working overtime until the afternoon on multiple days when investigators photographed his Jeep parked outside his home. On one occasion, his vehicle was documented at his residence at 12:42 p.m. — despite his timesheet showing he was “washing and cleaning trucks” until 3:00 p.m.
- Timothy Manning: Submitted nearly 1,700 hours of overtime, netting an extra $100,000 on top of his salary. His red truck left the facility hours ahead of his reported shift end times on six different occasions. On three of those days, Manning’s truck sat at his home while he was supposedly still clocking time-and-a-half.
- Steve Teixeira: Pulled in $97,000 in overtime last year. Surveillance footage showed him leaving the yard in the late morning on days he claimed to have worked until 3:00 p.m.
When confronted, most workers either declined to answer or offered hollow denials. Timothy Manning, when asked what he was talking about, simply said: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Brian Walker refused comment entirely. Teixeira insisted he was working the hours on his records, but the video says otherwise.
The investigation never witnessed a single employee return to the facility after leaving in a personal vehicle, yet somehow every single overtime hour was approved by a supervisor.
This Is What Waste Looks Like
The scandal becomes even more absurd when you compare it to neighboring states. In New Hampshire, a DOT employee holding the exact same job title — Highway Maintenance Worker II — took home a combined total of $79,000 last year, base pay plus overtime included. In Massachusetts, these guys are more than tripling that.
This isn’t about workers finding clever loopholes in an imperfect system. This is about a supervisory failure so complete that it makes you wonder what management is even doing. Government waste at this scale happens when oversight collapses and accountability disappears.
The state’s response has been predictably limp. MassDOT claimed it “takes any allegation of improperly reporting time worked extremely seriously” and expects employees to “accurately report time worked and supervisors to properly review and certify time records — it’s the law.” Great. Except they didn’t. Not even close.
What Happens Now?
Governor Healey is promising prosecutions and firings. The seven suspended employees remain off the job while the state conducts an internal investigation. Whether actual charges get filed remains to be seen — state governments have a remarkable track record of investigating their own and finding ways to make problems quietly disappear.
The real question: How many other facilities across MassDOT have the same problem? If supervisors at Charlestown couldn’t catch this level of fraud despite it being glaringly obvious in hindsight, what else is slipping through the cracks? Why did it take external media surveillance to uncover what should have been caught by basic internal controls?
You can read the full Boston 25 investigation here. The timecard records and surveillance evidence are laid out in plain sight.
This is what happens when government agencies stop policing themselves — and why every dollar of your tax money deserves better oversight than this.
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