According to a new audit by the city comptroller’s office, New York City authorities paid the controversial migrant shelter contractor DocGo about $1.7 million for approximately 10,000 nights of hotel rooms that were not used during the first two months of the contract. The city also reportedly overpaid DocGo by more than $2 million for security personnel in May and June of 2023.
City comptroller Brad Lander claims that $4.7 million of the $13.8 million that the city paid the contractor in the first two months of the contract was “unallowed” and need to be recovered. This amounts to more than a third of the total payments made by the city to the contractor. Furthermore, DocGo neglected to provide accurate paperwork for almost half of the costs incurred during that time, which came to a total of more than $6.3 million.
“It really is atrocious mismanagement,” Lander stated during a morning press conference. “Their failure to review these invoices seriously just represents a real callous disregard for taxpayer dollars.”
In response, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration stated that the audit’s highlighted oversight and accountability issues had long since been addressed. Officials further stated that the city was responding to an emergency that was developing during the audit’s referenced months and that prompt action was required.
“The comptroller can nitpick the first two months of an emergency contract more than a year after the fact and long after new safeguards were put in place, but he cannot claim to have saved a single migrant family from sleeping on the streets,” Mayor Eric Adams’s spokesman, Liz Garcia, said in a statement.
The report was released one week after Lander, Adams’ left-leaning progressive opponent, declared he will run against Adams for the Democratic Party’s 2025 mayoral candidacy.
Since the beginning of the inflow in 2022, New York public has taken in almost 210,000 migrants, and as of right now, about 64,500 are staying in public shelters. Lander wrote a number of studies criticizing the administration’s response to the crisis, pointing out its excessive expenditure on no-bid contracts and the restrictions placed on migrant refuge.
The results also cast further doubt on DocGo, the medical care provider that NYC selected in a $432 million no-bid contract to run migrant shelters last year. The business’s contract with the local shelters ended in May, and it will terminate in December for the upstate locations.
