Audit Report on the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Response and Follow-up to Pest Control Complaints

Audit Report on the Department of
Health and Mental Hygiene’s Response and Follow-up to Pest Control Complaints

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The objective of this audit was to determine whether the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) adequately followed the procedures it established to address pest control complaints. DOHMH enforces the City Health Code and protects and promotes the mental and physical health of New Yorkers. DOHMH’s Pest Control Services (PCS) division performs inspections, notifications, baiting, and clean-ups of properties when owners fail to act, in order to reduce the presence of rodents in New York City. In Fiscal Year 2013, PCS received 24,586 complaints and conducted 21,563 initial pest control inspections in response to those complaints.

Audit Findings and Conclusions

DOHMH did not adequately follow its own procedures for addressing pest control complaints. When we accompanied inspectors on their daily routes, we found discrepancies between our observations and the inspection results recorded by the inspectors in its database. We also found that initial and compliance inspections were not consistently performed in a timely manner; the agency had no established timeframes for assessments,¹ exterminations, and clean-ups; a number of complaints were closed prematurely;  and there was no follow-up for failed inspections of addresses recorded as “unknown” in its database.  These issues resulted from inadequate oversight of the PCS operations.Our review found that only 1.4 percent of the inspections performed during our review period received supervisory checks, far fewer than the agency’s stated goal of 5 percent. Our review also found no indication that senior crew chiefs performed the required assessments in 44 percent of the instances where inspectors requested clean-up services.

Audit Recommendations

To address the findings raised by this audit, we made 12 recommendations including that:

• DOHMH should ensure that all inspectors use the handhelds provided to them to enter results in real time while conducting the inspections to improve the reliability of the information entered into its database and to accurately account for their time.
• DOHMH should periodically generate aging reports to identify complaints that are pending too long to help ensure that initial and compliance inspections are performed in a more timely manner.
• DOHMH should improve controls over pest control processes to ensure that all requested exterminations and approved clean-ups are conducted.
• DOHMH should modify its process to ensure that complaints are not closed after only one “no access” attempt because the procedures require making two attempts.
• DOHMH should ensure that abatement orders are issued for properties that failed inspections where addresses in its database were recorded as “unknown.”
• Based on DOHMH’s assertion that it is re-establishing a new percentage of inspections that will receive supervisory review, we recommend that the revised percentage be based on analysis of DOHMH’s past inspections and other data.  This new percentage should reasonably ensure the quality of the staff inspections conducted and not be based on the number of supervisors available to conduct these reviews.

Agency Response

In its response, DOHMH agreed with three recommendations, partially agreed with four recommendations, and disagreed with five recommendations.  However, as to four of the recommendations DOHMH asserted that it disagrees with, its basis for disagreeing is that it claims the recommendations have already been implemented.  Consequently, DOHMH appears to generally agree in principle with all but one of the audit’s twelve recommendations.

Regarding the audit’s findings, however, DOHMH officials stated that the agency “strongly disagrees with the auditors [sic] assessments and believes that the auditors reached incorrect conclusions because they focused only on complaints while ignoring non-complaint based inspections.”  However, DOHMH’s assertion regarding the basis for the audit’s conclusions is incorrect.  In determining whether DOHMH made adequate efforts to address complaints, the audit took into consideration all efforts made by the agency, whether or not those efforts were related to specific complaints.  In every instance where DOHMH provided relevant, competent evidence to rebut an audit finding or a deficiency, the audit findings were adjusted accordingly.

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