-Audit finds workers claimed they cleaned up lots – but photographs show the sites already were clean! –

-Inefficient use of resources and lack of supervision squander taxpayer dollars-

New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. holds a news conference on Monday, July 14, 2008 to expose how the Department of Sanitation had poor checks and balances over the identification and cleaning of vacant properties.

Vacant lot located adjacent to 1192 Ogden Avenue in the Bronx where Sanitation Department issued a work order to clean up weeds and litter.  DSNY later claimed to have removed more than 16 tons of trash from the location.

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New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr.- armed with an audit identifying how city workers claimed to remove tons of garbage from vacant lots that already were clean - today called on the City Department of Sanitation to clean up its own supervision to prevent waste and abuse.

“I’m astounded by these findings,” Thompson said. “It appears as if the Department of Sanitation has no real checks and balances when it comes to oversight of supervisors in the field.  If a lot is clean, how can tons of refuse be removed?”

“It’s shameful that the Department of Sanitation has spent taxpayer dollars to remove waste that wasn’t even there. Now, I call that wasteful.”

The audit – available at www.comptroller.nyc.gov - covered July 1, 2006 to March 31, 2008 and determined that the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) had meager controls over the identification and cleaning of vacant properties in its Vacant Lot Clean-up Program.

And these shortcomings meant that the DSNY’s Lot Cleaning Division (LCD) not only used City resources inefficiently but may have misused equipment and manpower. The majority of LCD’s funding is provided by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development through Community Development Block Grants, which target cleanups in low- and moderate-income areas.

“My auditors found such weak monitoring that there was the potential for fraud. There are simply too few controls and oversight is practically non-existent,” Thompson said. “I demand that the Department of Sanitation strengthen its oversight so that New Yorkers can trust that its clean-up crews aren’t cleaning up themselves.”

Thompson said much of the problems were able to take place because there is a clear lack of segregation of duties and improper supervision in the Field Operations Unit, which is responsible for generating work orders in the field after identifying a vacant lot in need of cleaning. Auditors found that there was little oversight of field supervisors’ lot selections.

“These weak controls resulted in a number of lots that were allegedly being cleaned even when my auditors determined no such actions were warranted,” Thompson said.

For example, auditors examined 76 lots identified by the DSNY as in need of cleaning.

Yet, auditors found that an astounding 31 – or 41% - already were clean.

But despite this, DSNY reported that it cleaned the lots – and amazingly claimed to have paid dumping fees for the garbage to be removed from 13 of them. Workers even reported removing between two and 16 tons of trash from four of those lots, and then paying dumping fees.

Auditors also discovered other disturbing problems:

• Lot Cleaning Division supervisors occasionally assigned more labor and equipment than necessary to clean vacant lots, such as collection trucks and passenger vans, with one lot in Brooklyn expending 246 work hours to clean.  As a comparison, lots of similar size expended an average of 22.5 work hours.

• An examination of work orders found that, as of November of last year, 1,800 had been open in the DSNY computer program for an average of more than three years.  Most of these were for privately owned lots to which DSNY could not gain access. In order to gain access, a Notice of Violation should be issued and a warrant obtained from the court.

“There are clear procedures for gaining access to a privately owned lot and the Sanitation Department has been lax in its ability to obtain and provide the necessary information to properly perform its duty,” Thompson said.  “Omissions of necessary information such as incomplete addresses and misidentification of property owners are obstructing this process.”

• A review of procedures for handling vacant lot complaints and field generated work orders revealed that there are no written time standards for resolving these types of requests. “Time standards are an important tool to help measure operational efficiency,” Thompson said. “Without standards, DSNY is unable to gauge the success of its program.”

Auditors determined that lot cleanings took place more rapidly when New Yorkers called 311 than when they did not. Of the 6,191 lots reportedly cleaned in FY 2007, 1,141 were triggered by 311-related complaints and 5,050 were the result of non-311 complaints. It took an average of 35 days to clean the lots referred by 311 and 45 days for the rest.

“The Department of Sanitation’s goal of cleaning vacant lots in a timely fashion is hindered by its weak oversight of personnel and an excessive distribution of resources to ‘clean’ lots that are already clean,” Thompson said.  “DSNY should also set time standards for complaints and work orders to ensure they are completed in a timely manner.”

The Comptroller made nine recommendations, and DSNY generally agreed with eight while taking one under advisement. Thompson also noted that since the audit, DSNY has instituted training sessions to improve the accuracy and proper completion of the needed paperwork to access private lots.

The Comptroller found, for instance, that by utilizing its PowerBuilder computer program more efficiently to generate reports on aging cases, DSNY can better research cases that have been open for a considerable amount of time. The Department, he noted, has now begun to use the program to resolve aging cases.

“I’m encouraged that the Department agrees with most of our recommendations,” Thompson said. “That’s a good start. New York City taxpayers deserve nothing less.”

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