THE HEAD OF the MBTA’s Carmen’s Union ramped up his assault on the agency’s move to privatize money collection, claiming the first week of a new system resulted in untold lost revenue from streams of riders going through open gates for free triggered by fare vending machines that wouldn’t work because they were too stuffed with uncollected cash.

“When trucks don’t go out to pick up money often enough, the machines fill up,” union president James O’Brien told the T’s Fiscal & Management Control Board on Monday. “We received notices from employees that fare gates were being left open to accommodate the amount of riders who had to be given free trips due to inoperable fare machines.”

But MBTA officials after the meeting dismissed the claims, saying there have always been uncollected fare boxes because of unforeseen circumstances and no one is authorized to open fare gates to allow passengers in for free.

“Anytime a bill vault fills to capacity, the machine will give you an error that says ‘cash not acceptable’,” said Nick Easley, director of flexible contracting, who is overseeing the transition of the money room. “That machine is still operable. It can still take credit cards. It can still accept Charlie Tickets. There’s no policy that says we’ll open all our fare gates and let people through.”

The union and T officials are battling over the decision to privatize the collection and transport of the roughly $200 million the money room handles every year. The MBTA made the move after a searing consultant’s report claimed numerous security lapses in the money room as well as variances between what is reported as collected and what is deposited. The report came after a similar finding by the State Auditor two years before that found the same issues and a variance of as much as $100 million over a five-year period.

The more recent audit also said the MBTA could save a significant portion of the $10 million it spends each year on wages and benefits for 78 counting room employees by moving the operation to a third-party vendor.

The T put Shellie Crandall, the consultant who wrote the audit, in charge of streamlining the money room operations in anticipation of privatizing the system. Crandall has implemented several changes the union claims are causing the pick-up problems and running up unnecessary overtime.

O’Brien said there were 84 machines that were not serviced in the last week because of a reduced number of trucks picking up money. Twelve of the machines, he said, would not accept cash. Others, he said, could not dispense change to customers. So if they didn’t have exact fare for a bus trip, O’Brien said the riders were let on for free.

“There’s no way to calculate how much money the MBTA lost because of this poor management,” he said.

Easley said he watched 48 hours of video from the weekend of one of the stations identified by O’Brien, but saw no one being allowed in for free because they couldn’t get a machine to take their money. Brian Shortsleeve, the MBTA’s acting general manager, said the number of trucks picking up fare money was reduced because routes have been consolidated. He said the number of unserviced machines was reduced from 84 last week to 23 in the most recent count. He said the unsubstantiated claim by O’Brien was just a continuation of a union mindset opposed to privatizing the T.

“The money room routes haven’t been rerouted in years,” said Shortsleeve. “There’s never been an effort to run these routes in a more efficient basis… The status quo at the money room needs to change.”