A new audit reveals Big Apple taxpayers are being robbed of millions of dollars thanks to no-bid contracts rushed out by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration to deal with the immigration crisis. .
The agreement, entered into under the city’s emergency contracting program, allowed various commercial companies to charge “exorbitant fees” for staffing at some immigrant shelters, according to the report. However, there is little oversight or review.
“The city took advantage of the initial state of emergency to permit commercial enterprises,” said a report released Tuesday by City Comptroller Brad Lander’s office.
An inspector general’s investigation into four such transactions found that supervisors and security staff at various asylum seeker facilities were paid “significantly different wages” despite providing exactly the same services. It turned out that it was.
The no-bid deal pushed forward by the Adams administration was “fundamentally more expensive” than hiring new city employees to staff the shelter, the report said.
The report states that “approximately $50 million in annual savings would be achieved if consistent staffing levels were provided through the hiring of city employees rather than emergency contracts.”
According to the audit, three of the four contracts were awarded without competitive bidding under emergency powers granted to the mayor by the Comptroller General in November 2022 to deal with the relentless influx of immigrants.
SLSCO, one of the contracted companies, Texas-based disaster recovery companywas found to have paid shelter supervisors nearly $1,500 per eight-hour shift at the start of the contract, while DocGo, a coronavirus testing turned migrant shelter company, paid facility managers nearly $1,500 per eight-hour shift. He paid $2,000 per person, the report said. .
By comparison, Essey, the only contract of the four analyzed that went through a competitive bidding process, paid supervisors just under $550 per day.
In one “particularly egregious example,” SLSCO was charging 237% more per hour than Essey for a similar contract role, while DocGo was charging 146% more than Essey, the audit found. It turned out that.
A comparison of similar job descriptions found that under the SLSCO and DocGo contracts, security guards earned approximately $90 and $50 per hour, respectively.
But the city would have withheld just $29.80 an hour for the currently advertised Department of Health peace officer, the audit found.
“The Office of the Comptroller has determined that the labor costs to serve asylum seekers at the Lowe Hotel are approximately “We estimate that it was 2.5 times higher,” the report said.
The audit comes as the Adams administration plans to enter into a $53 million no-bid contract with a controversial New Jersey-based company to provide prepaid credit cards to immigrants. .
The one-year contract with tech finance company Mobility Capital Finance (MoCaFi) raised eyebrows, with some City Council members pointing out that the contract did not go through the normal competitive bidding process to avoid scrutiny.
“Contracts with asylum seekers demonstrate the risk of this process getting out of control. Labor costs are very high, there is little consistency between agencies, and the costs are much lower than traditional procurement or hiring city staff. and high costs,” the inspector general’s report said.
“Vendors supply staff to perform comparable tasks at widely different rates from each other, and their rates are significantly higher than those typically paid to existing shelter providers in New York City, and most If the public sector charges higher than the private rates for ‘servants’. ”
