Ed bigs blasted
Failed to track millions for special-needs kids
THE CITY Education Department failed to keep tabs on $84 million it paid to outside vendors for services to students with disabilities, a new audit charges.
In the report to be released Monday, Controller Scott Stringer shows the city didn’t track payments for services such as physical therapy, speech therapy and psychological counseling in 2016.
As a result, Stringer (photo inset) said, the city made thousands of bad payments for bogus treatments and services, wasting taxpayers’ money.
“Children with special needs deserve nothing but the best,” Stringer said. “But between the shoddy oversight and duplicative payments, it’s clear the Department of Education isn’t delivering.”
Stringer’s 20-page report examines whether the city has adequate controls on payments to contractors who deliver services to kids with disabilities required by state law.
Investigators found widespread problems that Stringer said put millions of dollars at risk for fraud or waste — and do a disservice to the city’s roughly 220,000 students with disabilities.
“Adults in the bureaucracy are wasting dollars that should be spent on students with special needs,” Stringer said. “It’s wrong and it’s heartbreaking.”
Among other things, Stringer uncovered roughly 3,000 instances in which the city erroneously paid duplicative and overlapping charges to vendors who claimed to have treated the same students at the same time. The bunk payments totaled more than $131,000. Education Department officials are investigating the payments and will seek to recover the money if appropriate, agency officials said. The probe also found records suggesting another $1 million in duplicate payments, in a separate database. Investigators also found the city relies on parents to report billing problems using a mail-based system with documents written only in English and without return envelopes or postage. Parents responded only 190 times to 53,312 letters the city sent to check for billing problems in 2016. That’s a response rate of less than 0.5% The probe also found that the city deactivated a system that used attendance records to flag wrongful payments for services that occurred when students weren’t in class — because the city’s own records aren’t reliable.
As a result, Stringer said, city officials don’t know how much money they’ve wasted on bad services or treatments that never happened.
Education Department spokeswoman Toya Holness said the city reviewed Stringer’s audit and disagreed with a majority of its recommendations.
The issues the city does not dispute will be investigated and addressed, Holness said.
“We have robust financial processes in place that serve students, schools and taxpayers — 99.9% of over 2 million sessions billed by vendors in school year 2015-16 had no errors identified,” Holness said. “Any discrepancies are immediately investigated and addressed.”