The city faced a crisis. An ocean of humanity was arriving in waves not seen since the early 1900s. These would-be citizens—escaping oppressive conditions in their birth countries—needed housing. They needed food. Children had to go to school. City agencies, overwhelmed, improvised ad-hoc solutions, bidding out and awarding contracts to hotels, shelters, food service companies, etc., on an emergency basis. While they did their best to ensure oversight, each agency was siloed and there was no central repository for information. Many processes that could be automated were still done manually and there was no way to compare contract prices between siloed agencies. A great deal of money was being spent with only limited oversight.
Not since Ellis Island…
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Through the Department of Investigation (DOI), the city engaged an Integrity Monitor with a mandate to identify fraud, waste, and abuse in the program. The Integrity Monitor upgraded and automated the city's existing systems and established a central data repository, providing, for the first time, a comprehensive, cross-agency view of the program as a whole. The city can now compare invoices, contracts, and individual line items across vendors, locations, and agencies. The granularity of the data makes for more precise budgeting and makes it easier to spot anomalies. The Integrity Monitor provides weekly reports on site visits conducted where asylum seekers are housed and holds calls with the DOI each Friday—more often if needed—to help ensure that all parts of the Initiative stay in sync.
An Integrity Monitor provides oversight
The city estimates that it will spend up to $12 billion to house and care for the asylum seekers through 2026. During that time, the city’s Integrity Monitor will continue to review city contractors while adding capabilities to the automated systems it has developed and implemented.
Sticking with the program
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