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QUESTION
Council Member Won Asks Comptroller About Disparities in MWBE Contract Values and Late Payments
3:15:36
ยท
165 sec
Council Member Julie Won addresses disparities within Asian American Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprises (MWBEs), questioning high average contract values for Asian American MWBEs due to outlier contracts. Deputy Comptroller Charlotte Hamamgian acknowledges the need for further data analysis on disparities within MWBE groups and discusses the persistent issue of late payments to MWBEs, suggesting the implementation of 'contract stat' as a management tool to improve timely contract registration and mitigate payment delays.
Speaker 2
3:15:36
Before with the Merrill Ad agencies over here, what came up when we talk about the fairies within disparity or diversity within diversity.
3:15:45
It's also in your report that identifies higher average contract value for Asian American MWDEs.
3:15:50
And there was speculation that it may be driven by a high value contract, high value contracts registered to those MWEs through the office of technology and innovation.
3:16:01
Have you examined that data, what that data looks like without those outliers for Asian American MWDEs?
Speaker 20
3:16:10
Not in our report, but all of our source data is something that we not only public publicly make available we'd also be happy to do that particular pivot for you.
Speaker 2
3:16:20
Yeah.
3:16:21
I would love to look at the disaggregation because I know that there are disparities even within the Asia American, like, minority group for East Asians, and then all of the different, like, South Asian groups, etcetera.
3:16:33
The same way that we were able to disaggregate the API for the census.
3:16:36
I would love to see that on a city level for all of our contracts as well so that we can make sure that there is equity and your report notes that MWE's are being paid late on over 60% of their contracts, and you heard them dispute that number saying that it was 21% that they disagree with whatever the methodology is or whatever they wanna say.
3:16:56
And that the citywide number for procurement contracts is even worse than almost 66%.
3:17:02
So do you have any recommendations on how we fix this problem?
3:17:05
This appears remarkably worse than last year and it's not sustainable if the time percentage continues to fall.
Speaker 20
3:17:17
I'm gonna stress again, I think the importance of contract stat, which I think we've testified to before, which is really to be used as a as a management tool.
3:17:28
It's not there to to ping agencies.
3:17:31
It's really there to help agencies, to help us in working collaboratively with the admin registration, identify what are the steps that we need to take, including potentially legislative steps to help speed along the process.
3:17:46
You know, I I've I've mentioned it before, but, again, I think that sometimes well intention efforts to help clear backlogs, unintentionally deprioritizes, making sure that the next year contracts are being timely registered.
3:18:02
And so again, in order to avoid this cyclical problem of we're clearing the old but creating a new problem, contract stat would really help us to make long term solutions and improvements in this space.
Speaker 2
3:18:14
Okay.
3:18:15
So we'll keep on following up to make sure that contracts that is the new releases done on time.