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Program Suffers From Chronic Delays and Insufficient Public Access

Delays Can Affect City 's Cash Flow

New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. today released a report faulting the City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) for “extensive and chronic” delays in processing rat abatement charges, thereby saddling unsuspecting property owners with liens on newly acquired properties. These delays can affect the City's cash flow, because the City cannot be reimbursed for the cleanup costs it has incurred until property owners are billed.

“New Yorkers have the right to know that pending charges will become a property lien when they purchase real estate,” Comptroller Thompson said. “The City's failure to process charges for pest control in a timely manner and to give the public access to the information about these charges can have serious ramifications.”

The report examined the DOHMH's Office of Pest Control Services (PCS), which identifies properties with rodent-related health hazards and takes corrective action when owners fail or refuse to abate the problem. When PCS conducts abatement work, DOHMH sends the billing information to the Department of Finance (DOF), which collects fees and penalties related to the abatement. Once DOF has this information, it is posted on its public FAIRTAX Computer system.

The Comptroller's analysis revealed major problems in the transfer of information from DOHMH to DOF, largely due to DOHMH. Virtually no charge was sent by DOHMH to DOF within 10 days of the date the work was completed, and only 9.7 percent of these charges were sent to DOF within 30 days. Astonishingly, almost one in 10 of these charges was not sent to DOF even after 180 days.

In contrast, DOF posted almost 70 percent of PCS charges to the FAIRTAX system on the same day they were received, and nearly 99 percent were processed within 30 days. The median processing time for DOF was one day; for DOHMH it was 60 days.

The report also found that DOHMH's record-keeping system, including its computerized pest control database, is designed for internal use and does not provide the public with consistent access to clear and reliable information before the charges ultimately get posted on DOF's FAIRTAX system. This city's Administrative Code requires DOHMH to maintain a record-keeping system that allows property owners, prospective purchasers, banks and others to obtain information about work performed by DOHMH on individual properties.

The City's failure to process PCS charges in a timely manner and provide public access to rodent abatement records can have serious ramifications. The report found that 48 properties, with a collective 80 DOHMH charges totaling $155,000, were sold after abatement work on the property was done, but before the date the charges were posted to the FAIRTAX system.

“The delays and the limited access represent a risk that the City has, in effect, put on the shoulders of unwitting prospective purchasers and mortgagees,” Thompson said. “It is telling that title insurers exclude coverage for any charges that may exist in DOHMH's records but are not posted to the FAIRTAX system when the search is conducted.”

Thompson noted that these delays additionally can affect the City's cash flow, because the City cannot be reimbursed for the cleanup costs it has incurred until property owners are billed by DOF. The nearly 10,000 liens that were examined for the Comptroller's report collectively represented $2.9 million in costs for which the City had not yet been reimbursed.

Thompson's report makes four key recommendations:

•   DOHMH should immediately put into place procedures to ensure that PCS records are reasonably available to the public. Although rodent abatement charges are technically available to the public before being posted to the FAIRTAX system, on too many occasions interested parties have to navigate significant bureaucratic obstacles to get to the records. The public should be able to visit or call the PCS central and/or borough offices and be able to view abatement records within 30 days of the issuance of work orders.
•   DOHMH should monitor the processing of PCS abatement work records to ensure that charges are processed in a timely manner.
•   DOHMH should report in the Mayor's Management Report the number of days it takes to process rodent abatement records and forward them to DOF.
•   The Administrative Code should be amended to specify a period of 30 days after the completion of abatement work within which DOHMH must forward the relevant records to DOF for posting on the FAIRTAX system.

The public has a right to have ready access to clear, consistent and reliable information,” Thompson said. “Eradicating rats is a priority; however, we should not place a burden on innocent future property owners after the rats are gone.”