The allegations should violate anyone’s sense of justice: state workers shredding thousands of written requests for name-clearing hearings from people accused of child abuse, then falsely declaring that the accused had withdrawn their requests.

The result: 25,000 people blocked for years from getting jobs working with children.

The shredding party went on for a month in 2004 in the state Office of Children and Family Services’ headquarters in Albany, carried out as most illicit acts are: after midnight, when no one is watching.

That’s according to testimony from the workers who were ordered to shred and toss the requests. They said their supervisors needed to get rid of a seven-year backlog quickly — a lawsuit filed at the time would bring scrutiny. The backlog disappeared, and so did the rights of New Yorkers across the state.

The workers complained to supervisors, according to court papers, but no one took action. At a staff meeting, one worker compared the shredfest to a notorious shredding episode: “Isn’t this kind of like what happened with Martha Stewart?” The worker was not invited back to any staff meetings, she testified.

OCFS runs the statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment that employers must check before hiring someone to work with children. Months and years after someone had applied for a job, OCFS was calling employers to see if they were still interested in an applicant, which most were not because too much time had elapsed, the state workers said. OCFS would then mark the hearing request waived, as if the accused had waived it, and the child abuse accusation would remain on their record, the workers said.

Five years after the shredding, an OCFS worker blew the whistle. Now the state has agreed to a proposed settlement of a class-action lawsuit in which it will send letters to people who might have filed those hearing requests and give them a chance to be heard. The state also agreed that only the accused, not OCFS, had the right to withdraw their requests.

It’s been a year since the whistleblower came forward. As many as 19 OCFS workers testified in depositions for the lawsuit about the shredding and phony withdrawal of requests. Does it end there? It should not.

But the state attorney general’s office, according to a spokesman, never investigated possible crimes or other violations that might have resulted in disciplinary action against the supervisors who ordered the shredding. The attorney general surely was aware of the allegations; his office defended the state in the lawsuit.

The allegations are chilling, but apparently not interesting enough to Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and his staff. The state Inspector General’s Office also did not investigate, according to lawyers involved in the lawsuit.

Shouldn’t the word “shredding” in a context like this automatically trigger an investigation? The AG’s office in recent months has found time to investigate a case of a wedding photographer defrauding his clients and a college professor hiring actors to falsely testify on his behalf in another fraud case. There ought to be time for an investigation into a state agency running roughshod over the rights of thousands.