The Comptroller of enabled corruption

 

NY Daily News 

A city contractor that agreed to cough up nearly $13 million to settle a federal false claims lawsuit in January has registered five contracts with the city comptroller’s office, public records show.

The Door, a non-profit that offers reproductive health care and other services to adolescents, had contracts worth more than $3.8 million registered with Comptroller Brad Lander’s office since Jan. 27, when it admitted to submitting inaccurate records to the state Health Department — raising questions about why Lander and Mayor Adams’ administration would approve of deals with an entity implicated in a “civil fraud action.”

“The vetting process is to weed out possible illegality and fraud,” said Michael Lambert, a former deputy comptroller for the city. “This just strikes me as unusual. It seems uncharacteristic of the way the process is supposed to work.”

Lambert said that The Door’s inaccurate reporting amounted to a “serious violation of the public trust,” which at the very least merits additional scrutiny from the comptroller and the Adams administration.

Instead, in its submissions to the state from August 2009 to November 2016, The Door counted the number of services rendered, rather than the number of visits — which is the appropriate measure under state guidelines, according to the settlement. The non-profit did that even after its then-chief financial officer told a Door data analyst in 2014 that the appropriate measure to submit was the number of visits to the facility, not the number of services provided.

In its complaint, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York’s Southern District alleged that The Door “knowingly” violated the federal False Claims Act by submitting false reports to the state.

In the settlement agreement, The Door acknowledged that its actions caused the indigent care pool “to pay funds to The Door to which it was not entitled.”

“The Door’s extraordinary cooperation is expressly acknowledged in the settlement agreements we signed with both the New York Attorney General’s Office and the United States Attorney’s Office,” said Door spokeswoman Mika De Roo. “Once the stipulations were issued, we immediately made full restitution in February 2022, without cutting or ending any of the critical services we provide to at-risk youth in New York City, and likewise made prompt, full, and appropriate disclosure of the matters settled to the city agencies that fund these services.”

The Door ultimately agreed to pay the federal government $2.7 million and the state government $10.2 million as part of the settlement.

THE CITY 

A top tree-trimming firm whose owners were charged last year with insurance fraud has been placed under the city Department of Investigation’s monitorship — a legal limbo so it can resume work pruning trees in the city’s two biggest boroughs as the case proceeds, officials said.

Brooklyn-based Dragonetti Brothers Landscaping is one of just a handful of private firms who work on trees maintained by the Parks Department, along with performing other city work. But last September, brothers Nicholas and Vito Dragonetti were indicted on accusations of evading more than $1 million in insurance premiums while repairing city roads and sidewalks, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office. 

Since their arrests, however, public tree trimming in Brooklyn and Queens has been nonexistent, Brooklyn Paper reported last week, even as branch work in other boroughs is just being reinstated after COVID cuts.

“Routine block pruning in Manhattan, Bronx and Staten Island is ongoing,” Crystal Howard, a spokeswoman for the Parks Department, told THE CITY in a statement this week. “We expect pruning in Queens and Brooklyn to resume this fall and to reach the annual goal of 65,000 street trees pruned in Fiscal 2023.”

The Parks Department only recognizes a few landscaping companies as qualified to do the work, so officials went back to the scandal-tarred Dragonetti Brothers — awarding them an $8.39 million contract in August for “emergency tree services in The Bronx and Manhattan,” according to the city comptroller. 

A more than $7 million contract for Queens tree pruning will kick in soon, while a more than $5 million contract for Brooklyn tree pruning is in the final review stages, the Parks Department told THE CITY.