Your guide to NYC's public proceedings.
Q&A
Financial losses and contractor investigation takeaways
0:34:17
·
179 sec
Council Member Chris Banks inquires about the estimated financial losses due to unperformed services and the primary takeaways from investigations into NYCHA's contractors. Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber explains the difficulties in calculating losses and discusses recent investigations.
- Exact calculation of financial losses is difficult due to lack of proper inspections
- NYCHA calculated about half a million dollars in liquidated damages from October 2022 to February 2024
- Recent investigations include the micro-purchase issue and the current security/fire guard contract oversight failure
Chris Banks
0:34:17
What what is what is DOI's estimate of money, NYCHA, loss paying for these services that were never rendered?
0:34:25
And how was this how was this calculated?
Jocelyn Strauber
0:34:28
Right.
0:34:28
It's it's a difficult calculation to make, unfortunately, because NYCHA wasn't doing the inspections that would have identified guards absence, which would have given rise to both, you know, liquidated damages which NYCHA was entitled to under the contract or an affirmative remedy they could have sought and also would have obviously enabled them not to pay Allied for the work that Allied wasn't doing.
0:34:53
We we know that all I can actually give you on this, therefore, is NYCHA's calculation, which was about half a million dollars of liquidated damages that they calculated based on the inspections they did do from October 2022 to February 2024.
0:35:12
My understanding is at least as of the date of the issuance of the report, NYCHA had only received about $88,700 in damages based on Allied's failure to comply with the contract term.
0:35:25
But I can't actually give you a sort of overall picture.
0:35:29
You know, you could you could take the the findings that we made and extrapolate them out over the total number of guards that Allied provided.
0:35:35
I haven't done that math.
0:35:37
That would if if you viewed the work that we did as a representative sample, that might give you some rough sense, but that's probably a very, you know, inaccurate way to do a calculation.
0:35:46
So
Chris Banks
0:35:47
Thank you for that.
0:35:48
When it comes to previous investigations into NYCHA's contractors, based on this most recent investigation and previous investigations into NYCHA's contractors, what are your primary takeaways?
Jocelyn Strauber
0:36:07
Well, I mean, we've you know, there there have been sort of two major, you know, recent investigations that I'm thinking of that relate to contracting.
0:36:14
We had the the micro purchase issue, which may be one of the ones you're referring to.
0:36:20
You know, that that actually posed different issues, I think, than than this investigation does.
0:36:24
And I'm I'm sort of reluctant to speak in sweeping terms beyond the work that we've done.
0:36:29
We we certainly found in connection with the micro purchase investigation that resulted, as you know, in the charges against 70 NYCHA superintendents that there were policy improvements that, in fact, we had recommended a number of years before that we thought would have gone a long way to mitigating the risk of the kind of bribery that the micro purchase process, which although it has many advantages, has a number of downsides.
0:36:55
We thought there were recommendations that we made that in fact NYCHA has now implemented that would have potentially prevented some of the misconduct we saw in that case.
0:37:04
Here, this is this is not an issue that I'm aware that that DOI has addressed before, but I think fundamentally it was a failure of oversight of the contract of the vendor.
0:37:16
Okay.