New York City Comptroller Brad Lander launched a new resource on the Comptroller’s Office website to enhance transparency into the City’s contracting and budgeting for service provision to support asylum seekers. The page, titled “Accounting for Asylum Seeker Services,” brings together the most comprehensive publicly available set of the City’s known emergency contracts, budget projections, and high-level data on the asylum seeker population.
“As New York City opens its arms to thousands of asylum seekers, the Comptroller’s Office is committed to providing New Yorkers with an honest look into the City’s emergency response operations and spending. Our new web resource is a centralized hub for City agencies, the press, and the public to access key information on emergency contracting, budgeting, and the status of individuals in our shelter system,” said Comptroller Brad Lander.
During emergency situations, agencies are permitted to expedite procurement processes, bypassing competitive bidding and reducing integrity reviews. Since Spring 2022, the City has entered into hundreds of emergency contracts across many agencies to provide shelter, meals, medical care, transportation, and legal assistance (and the staffing support for all of these services) to tens of thousands of asylum seekers.
Because these contracts are entered into with little coordination by multiple agencies, including some with different procurement rules (e.g. NYC Health + Hospitals), and because most have not yet been submitted to the Comptroller’s office for registration, there is no coordinated database. The Comptroller’s office has assembled the records in the directory from data collected from PASSPort Public (the City’s contract processing database), registered contracts that have arrived at the Comptroller’s Bureau of Contract Administration, and additional lists provided by the Administration.
In July, the Comptroller’s Office released an audit of emergency procurement during the COVID-19 crisis that identified significant overspending and issued a guidance memo to City agencies to employ best practices for controlling costs and conducting oversight of vendors in an emergency contracting context. Read the Comptroller’s Office’s letter to agencies on vendor oversight and cost containment during emergency procurement.
“New York benefits from each wave of new immigrants who consistently bring new energy, ideas, businesses, culture generation-after-generation, and an abiding faith in the future of our city. New York City stands to benefit greatly from this newest wave of New Yorkers, if we can effectively manage the challenge of helping them find stable housing, get permission to work, and begin building their new lives here. For that, we need much more support from the federal and state governments, a significantly stronger focus on helping new arrivals file their applications for asylum and work authorization, and a even broader coalition of public, private, and civic partners. We hope this resource will provide transparent information that supports those efforts,” said Lander.
The Comptroller’s office will update this resource on a regular basis as data becomes available.
Explore the “Accounting for Asylum Seeker Services” resource.
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