The Honorable Eric Adams, Mayor
City of New York
City Hall
New York, NY 10007
The Honorable Adrienne Adams, Speaker
New York City Council
250 Broadway, Suite 1850
New York, NY 10007
New York City Council
City Hall
New York, NY 10007
Dear Mayor Adams, Speaker Adams, and Members of the City Council:
Attached is the Annual Report on the Operations of the Audit Bureau of the New York City Comptroller’s Office for Fiscal Year 2025. As mandated by the City Charter, this report summarizes the work my office completed in FY2025. Given the end of my administration, I have also taken the opportunity to reflect on the past four years of transformation and progress.
Audits and investigations are vital tools for improving how New York City serves its residents, and with this in mind, there has been a new focus on driving change. This has meant more complex audits that seek to answer big questions focused on outcomes and effectiveness, in subject areas designed to advance our strategic objectives—to strengthen the City’s operations; increase/prioritize equity and inclusion; improve the City’s fiscal position; mitigate risk; and deepen public engagement and education. In keeping with this, we have introduced key changes in the way the Audit Bureau selects audit topics, audit planning and testing, and in how we measure our work once it is completed.
We now measure our impact by contribution to these objectives, based on findings and recommendations; we track media coverage, as a key indicator of public interest in our work, and other outcomes in City government, such as law and policy changes as they occur. We track the implementation rate of recommendations, and since January 2022, we have moved from a “once and done” approach to continual tracking of implementation until final status is known. To increase public awareness, a public facing Recommendations Tracker was created, and perhaps most importantly, we have significantly increased direct engagement with New York City residents through participatory auditing.
Actual Change
The work of the Audit Bureau over the past four years has led to real change. Almost immediately after the NYC Ferry audit (see Appendix) was released, the administration responded by re-evaluating and issuing a new fee structure; the Homeless Sweeps Audit (see Appendix), which was released with a policy brief proposing that the City adopt a Housing First model to tackle homelessness informed Mayor-elect Mamdani’s announcement that his administration would be putting an end to sweeps upon taking office in January 2026; the audit of Speed Cameras (see Appendix), which identified over $100M in foregone revenue due to massive increases in the number of ghost and obscured license plates, led to the announcement of a joint City and State Taskforce to crack down on offenders; the recent audit of the Doula pilot program, which overwhelmingly found that the program is improving outcomes for Black and Latino birthing people, provided an impetus for the City Council to expand the program and move it from pilot status to a permanent program; our audit of NYPD’s Oversight of Its Agreement with ShotSpotter (see Appendix), not only won a national performance award from the Association of Local Government Auditors, but it contributed strongly to the national debate concerning the effectiveness of a tool that continues to be used in over 160 cities nationwide. The audit found that despite its $51M price tag, ShotSpotter only identified actual shootings 13% of the time, leading to the waste of precious officer hours. Our investigation into the City’s so-called “60-Day Rule” (see Appendix) which imposed limits on shelter stays for newly arrived asylum-seeking families and allowed eviction after 60 days, found the administration’s policy was executed in a haphazard and profoundly reckless manner, destabilizing vulnerable families and impeding pathways to education, work authorization, housing stability, and self-sufficiency. In response to the report, the administration modified its application of the Rule to reduce its impact on particularly vulnerable families.
In many instances our audits and investigations have been the subject of City Council hearings and testimony, and in every instance, they have improved transparency in City government.
People-(Em)powered Audits
In 2022, we spearheaded “People-Powered Audits,” a new form of civic engagement that amplifies the voices of those most often not heard, focusing on two groups: New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents and individuals with disabilities. In both cases my office engaged with stakeholders at all stages of the process–before, during and after project completion–listening to their lived experiences, asking what issues we should focus on, and involving residents themselves through committees of stakeholders and the use survey techniques to obtain qualitative evidence from those who matter most–those we serve.
In the case of the MTA Express Bus project, in a first-of-its-kind initiative, auditors partnered with volunteer wheelchair users to test wheelchair ramps in real conditions, and during 2025 we began other projects based on input from Roundtable participants. These projects are slated for completion in 2026.
The People-Powered initiative for NYCHA included significant audits and the Doors Observations (see Appendix)–another first-of-its-kind initiative that sent “all hands” from the Audit Bureau into the field for one week, to examine every NYCHA door, window, and external lock to assess the security of NYCHA housing. The focus on security came out of months of engagement with residents who identified security as a key concern. In FY2025, audits of NYCHA’s contractor repairs and PACT eviction practices were also completed; both audits were started by a vote by NYCHA Resident Audit Committee members. The first Resident Audit Committee was formed in 2022, leading to the issuance of four reports that revealed hundreds of doors and windows systemwide that were broken; inaccurate rent calculations at Redhook Houses; millions in unsupported payments for questionable work by small vendors; and poor oversight over PACT housing development eviction practices, leading to fewer services and higher eviction rates by certain property managers. I am pleased to report that a second Resident Audit Committee was recently seated in 2025 and one new audit selected by a vote by new Committee members is now underway.
Other forms of participation and resident engagement have been incorporated in any number of audits during my tenure, driving the selection of audit subjects, informing audit objectives, and incorporating the views of residents to assess the effectiveness of the services provided by the agencies under review. These efforts have been striking in highlighting the correlation between resident experience and the results of traditional quantitative testing and data analysis. The data, audit evaluation of documentation and outcomes, and what residents tell us about how they experience City services have aligned to a striking degree, validating the value of the People-Powered approach.
Effectiveness & Efficiency
My office has worked hard over the past four years to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of City programs and to suggest concrete recommendations designed to improve service delivery.
In FY2025, we examined the Behavioral Health & Emergency Assistance Response Division (B-HEARD), a pilot program that sends social workers and emergency medical teams, instead of uniformed police, to assist people in crisis. Our audit uncovered a program marked by systemic gaps in deployment and coordination, deficient tracking and accountability, and a fundamental inability to meet the needs of the community it is intended to serve.
Our audit of the Department of Education’s services for English Language Learners (ELL) (see Appendix) revealed unacceptable failures and inequities in service delivery. Most notably, DOE systematically denied legally mandated services: 48% of sampled ELL students did not receive required courses or instructional minutes, and 40% were taught by teachers lacking proper certifications in language instruction.
Our audit of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) found systemic weaknesses in how the City oversees the safety of children in foster care. Although ACS has monitoring tools in place, and although the audit found that incidents of neglect and abuse in foster care decreased between 2020 and 2023, it also found that over this period more than 1,600 children were victimized, with more than three-quarters of incidents taking place during visits with birth families—a critical area where ACS oversight is limited. Following this audit, my office wrote to the Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals urging closer collaboration with ACS to prevent instances of neglect and abuse during familial visits.
Our review of the City’s implementation of Commercial Waste Zones (see Appendix) (CWZ), a radical overhaul of how the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) collects waste from New York City’s businesses. We found that DSNY awarded contracts to carting companies with significant violation histories, and huge differences in pricing, despite claiming that compliance and pricing were significant factors in its Request for Proposals process. On average, each of the 18 selected carters had 241 safety, environmental, or labor violations over the prior four years. The carters selected by DSNY included eight of the 10 worst performers in the new CWZ system, with one company alone (Action Carting) racking up over 1,000 violations.
Our audit of Department of Education’s (DOE) Asbestos Management Program found longstanding oversight failures. From March 2021 to March 2024, just 18% of City school buildings known to contain asbestos were inspected by the agency on a triennial basis, and just 22% of schools underwent mandated six-month checks. These findings exposed system-wide noncompliance with the federal Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act (AHERA), stretching back decades.
Our Body-Worn Camera (see Appendix) review of NYPD found long delays in the release of camera footage in response to FOIL requests, poor internal accountability over body worn camera policies and procedures, and inconsistent activation rates by officers in the field.
The audit of DOB’s Enforcement of the City building code found that enforcement efforts and the imposition of penalties were almost completely complaint-driven, with the result that the imposition of violations and penalties correlated strongly to lower-income neighborhoods of color.
The audit of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s Affordable Neighborhood Cooperative Program (ANCP), a program designed to provide a pathway to ownership for income eligible individuals and families, found multi-year delays caused largely by poor planning and lack of proactive problem solving to target expected causes of delay.
The audit of DOE’s Oversight Over School Bus Vendors (see Appendix) found DOE’s processes wholly inadequate. Despite significant investment in new technologies and repeated promises to parents and students, DOE does not hold vendors accountable for woeful service. Despite spending $1.7B to meet transportation needs, students— disproportionately Special Education Students—continue to experience tremendous disruption and inconvenience which negatively impacts school performance and participation and creates additional burdens for families and other caregivers. Complaints have grown at appalling rates from a base of nearly 90,000 during the 2021—22 school year to almost 155,000 during the 2023—24 school year, disproportionately impacting children with special needs. This audit comes at a time when existing bus contracts are due to expire, providing DOE and the City with a rate opportunity to overhaul a system that is clearly not working.
Good Governance, Integrity & Accountability
Strong governance is the foundation of an accountable and effective city. This past four- year term has examined how agencies manage public resources and oversee vendors and identified significant deficiencies. These potentially erode public trust and undermine service quality.
Following allegations raised in the federal indictment against Mayor Eric Adams regarding the City’s Approval of Turkish House (the headquarters of the Turkish Consulate), my office launched an investigation. We found that Turkish House was the only office building of its size and category allowed to open without an approved Fire Protection Plan (FPP), and that FDNY and DOB cut serious corners that compromised the safety of both the occupants and neighbors of the building. The investigation uncovered much larger management deficiencies at DOB and prompted recommendations to increase agency transparency and to ensure that safety is never sacrificed.
Our follow-up audit of the 47th Street Business Improvement District’s (BID) operating practices (see Appendix) found persistent failures in governance by the BID, which serves Manhattan’s Diamond District. Despite prior warnings in 2019, the BID continued to mismanage hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds and implemented fewer than half of our earlier recommendations. The audit found inadequate board oversight, unchecked executive authority, and weak internal controls.
Our audit of the Department of Housing Preservation & Development’s (HPD) $432 million emergency contract with DocGo found that almost 80% of the $14M paid to the vendor between May and June of 2023 was not adequately supported by evidence before payment was made. The audit found that DocGo used nearly 67% of the amount it received to pay unauthorized subcontractors; and routinely understaffed hotels with caseworkers and social workers, failing to provide much-needed services to asylum-seeking families. When auditors visited these hotel rooms, 80% had at least one deficiency, and several posed serious health and safety hazards.
Our audits of Oversight Over Subcontractors by DFTA, ACS, DOHMH, DHS, and HRA (see Appendix) highlighted frequent areas of non-compliance with contract terms and conditions and with Procurement Policy Board Rules which require agencies to pre-approve the use of subcontractors by prime vendors. Unless this crucial area of non-compliance is addressed, the City will continue to have no idea who we are doing business with and who is providing social services on our behalf.
Audits by the Numbers
This office issued 785 recommendations to agencies between 2022 and 2025. Of these recommendations, agencies have agreed to implement 478 (61%), and based on our tracking throughout this four-year period, 361 (46%) have already been implemented, 29 (4%) were partially implemented and 316 (40%) remain pending. Based on data collected during this term, which shows that agencies need up to two years to implement the recommendations they intend to implement, we can expect the overall implementation rate to continue to grow through the end of 2027.
The total above includes 284 recommendations that were issued during FY2025, of which agencies agreed to implement 160 (56%) and partially implement a further 36 (13%). The data shows that although agencies take time to implement recommendations, most are ultimately implemented or partially implemented, even when in response to the draft they decline to provide a response or indicate they will not implement the recommendation. Further details follow in this Report’s Summary section, along with the data on impact by Strategic Objectives. Overwhelmingly, and fittingly, the findings and recommendations impact Effectiveness and Efficiency of agency operations.
We have worked to ensure that New York City’s fiscal standing is strong, and through innovative audits and public engagement, we are helping to build a fairer City accountable to its residents.
I am deeply grateful to the agencies that engaged constructively with our work and to the thousands of New Yorkers who shared their voices, experiences, and ideas. Together, we’ve raised the bar for what government accountability can be.
Sincerely,
Brad Lander