In the wake of massive overtime abuse at the Long Island Rail Road, the MTA is assigning yet more eyeballs to review employee pay. Fine — but let’s hope it’s not just part of an effort to distract from the LIRR’s real OT woes.

Wednesday, MTA Chairman Pat Foye said the agency has OK’d a plan for outside consultants to do a 60-day analysis of its payroll systems. The review won’t focus specifically on overtime, but it comes just weeks after the Empire Center reported soaring levels of OT at the LIRR.

The Post shined a light on that overtime in a series exposing the hard-to-believe hours some workers racked up, which signaled the possibility of criminal abuse.

Yet Foye has already asked the presidents of the LIRR, Metro-North and NYC Transit to conduct “full” reviews of their overtime procedures. The MTA’s inspector general is doing another probe.

On top of that, the Queens District Attorney’s Office and the Manhattan US attorney are looking into the agency’s labor costs and timesheet procedures, hunting for criminal misconduct. Now the board is calling in an outside consultant as well?

Let’s be clear: Fraudulent timesheets or other illegal shenanigans at the MTA are not only plausible but likely. In an agency with 70,000 people, noted Foye, “a very small minority of people” will cheat.

Yet he himself doubts there’s “a large amount of systematic overtime fraud” at the MTA. So why all the probes?

Perhaps it’s all an attempt to shift attention away from union-dictated work rules that drive up OT costs. After all, Gov. Andrew Cuomo responded to The Post’s series by stressing that the issue is “about stealing” — while staying mum on the need to change union-contract work rules that tie managers’ hands and force them to dole out enormous OT.

No one’s against cracking down on fraud. But until those contracts are fixed, costs will keep skyrocketing, at the public’s expense. Rest assured: The Post won’t be distracted from watching for that.

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