Kush biz high on list of ‘fine’ folks owing $1.5B

It’s time to pay up – for the city’s sake.

A day after a report revealed that the amount of uncollected fines owed to the city has climbed to $1.5 billion – including $500,000 owed by Kushner Companies alone – City Council Investigations Committee Chairman Ritchie Torres and Housing Rights Initiative chief Aaron Carr are calling for an investigation.

The pair wrote a letter to Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters requesting he investigate the “systemic failure of the City of New York” to collect the fines, calling the city “embarrassingly inept” at doing so.

The Associated Press reported this weekend that the number of outstanding fines owed to the city, mainly for construction and building violations, had climbed to $1.5 billion overall, citing data compiled by Housing Rights Initiative. Among the worst offenders was Kushner Companies, the real estate company once run by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

“What the city lacks – but needs now more than ever before – is a robust enforcement culture that treats debt evasion as an act every bit as serious as tax evasion,” Torres and Carr wrote in their letter to the Investigation Department. “Whether one is evading debt or taxes, the effect is the same: delinquents, like Kushner Companies, are evading their obligations to the city and robbing the public of finite resources that could shore up an increasingly decrepit public infrastructure.”

They noted other agencies, like the MTA, are better at collecting on such fines – and that the city could really use the cash.

“The city can hardly afford to continue foregoing more than a $1 billion in operating revenue,” they wrote.