Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta plans to rein in discretionary overtime in the wake of The Post's disclosure that firefighters and FDNY officers are racking up huge amounts of OT to inflate their pensions, aides said yesterday.
"The fire commissioner is considering a hard cap on the amount of administrative overtime that can be earned," FDNY spokesman Frank Gribbon said yesterday.
The cap would affect several hundred firefighters on light duty or in administrative posts, where insiders suspect the greatest abuses are occurring.
The Post revealed on Sunday that 72 percent of uniformed members of the FDNY have retired on tax-free disability pensions since 2004, often by inflating their pre-retirement-year paychecks with vast amounts of overtime.
By comparison, only 19 percent of cops qualified for disability retirements.
One veteran fire official with back problems retired last year with a $175,000 disability pension, an insider said.
"The real issue here is some people are working $50,000 a year in overtime," a source said.
"How can you work those kind of hours and be disabled?"
Overtime at the Fire Department this year is budgeted at $194 million - the highest since the aftermath of 9/11.
Last year, the department spent $137 million on OT.
Gribbon said there's no way the FDNY would spend the entire $194 million.
"I'm positive we're not going to reach it," he said, pointing out that the agency returned $23 million in OT funds last year.
He estimated total overtime expenditures would hit $150 million to $160 million by June 30, the end of the 2009 fiscal year.
According to the Inde pendent Budget Office, the most the Fire De partment has ever spent in overtime was $195 million in 2002, right after its ranks were dec imated in the World Trade Center attacks.
A year earlier, it spent only $82 million.
Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday he would "look into" the large number of taxpayer-supported disability pensions being dispensed by the 12-member Fire Department pension board, where he and the comptroller serve as the only elected officials.
"I don't know whether there are abuses or not," Bloomberg said. "In all fairness to the Fire Department, firefighting is a dangerous job."
