City missing over hundred million dollars from unpaid parking violations tickets

 

Gothamist 

The city is potentially missing out on more than $100 million in unpaid parking tickets and fees from 2012 to 2019, according to an audit from the State Comptroller’s office.

The city’s Department of Finance (DOF) is responsible for collecting parking fines and fees for people inside and outside of the state. But the audit determined that the DOF has lagged behind in collections: after reviewing some 262,765 cases over a seven year period between January 2012 and February 2019, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli identified $108,314,492 in outstanding fines.

“We determine that DOF did not maximize collection of fines and fees owed for parking violations. NYC has large outstanding balances due from summonses for parking violations, and DOF has not always taken timely action to collect the fines and fees,” the Comptroller’s report asserts.

The city issued more than 34 million red light, bus lane, school speed zone and parking violations worth $2.8 billion during the time period covered by the audit.

In a random audit of 153 cases worth more than $2 million in unpaid tickets, the comptroller’s office found the finance department only took action to collect money in 35 of the cases.

The comptroller’s office hopes the report will compel the finance department to do more to collect on unpaid tickets.

This report comes after an uptick in speeding tickets. During the pandemic, particularly in the first few months, there was an increase in speeding tickets issued to drivers, even as the number of drivers on the road decreased.

The Department of Finance is responsible for collecting tickets to cars with owners living in New York City. For all other vehicles it relies on the New York City law department, which hires a private law firm to collect money on car owners who live in California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. It’s unclear how the city collects on drivers from other states.

421-a rule change causes dip in regulated apartments

From AM-NY:

This spring, the city announced it had given hundreds of property owners one last chance to recoup the 421-a tax benefit by complying with provisions of a perk that aims to encourage the creation of affordable homes.

Now that the May 1 compliance deadline has passed, 730 of the 1,788 targeted properties lost the benefit, according to data provided by the city Department of Finance last month. Collectively, the properties lost about $22.38 million, according to the Department of Finance.

The property tax benefit was launched in the 1970s to spur residential construction. Over the years, it has been extended to co-ops, condos, two- to three-family homes and rental developments.

Although the city yanked 421-a from properties for a variety of concerns, advocates have focused their attentions on rental properties, since they must abide by rent stabilization rules while receiving 421-a.

Earlier this year, at least 367 developments with rental units had 421-a suspended for undisclosed reasons. The new city data shows 175 of these lots have had the benefit reinstated by fulfilling all of the 421-a requirements by May 1.

Laying down the law

From the NY Post:

The city has suspended a lucrative tax break from more than 1,700 property owners it says aren’t following the rules – a move that could cost them $66 million this year, officials said Friday.

The owners facing removal from the “421-a” tax abatement program failed to file a mandatory Final Certificate of Eligibility.

Officials said 1,788 properties — from three-family homes to multi-family buildings — didn’t register in time, so the city suspended the breaks. The non-compliant properties have a combined 11,022 apartments.

City officials said they’ll reinstate benefits to owners who comply by May 1.

Audit finds lots of misclassified buildings

From the Forum:

Nearly 100 mixed-use borough buildings have been improperly assessed by the Department of Finance and therefore taxed at an incorrect, lower rate, according to an audit released this week by City Comptroller Scott Stringer.

Prompted by the report’s findings, Finance has already begun to correct the tax status of the 97 buildings in Queens that auditors determined were misclassified.

According to Stringer, properties in New York City are given one of four tax classes: Class 1 are one- to three-unit buildings, primarily used for residential purposes; Class 2 are all other residential properties; Class 3 are properties owned by utilities and special franchises; and Class 4 are all other properties not in Class 1, 2, or 3. The audit examined whether Class 1 mixed-use buildings in Queens were properly assessed and taxed by the Department of Finance as of May 2015.

Auditors identified 97 buildings that were misclassified as Tax Class 1 mixed-use buildings, and taxed at a lower rate than they should have been. DOF agreed that 78 properties should be taxed at 45 percent of market value, instead of the residential rate of six percent at which they had been taxed, and that 19 properties required additional interior inspection, Stringer noted.

In total, Stringer’s office estimated that, after the changes are made, the City will bring in an additional $1.28 million in taxes over the next five years.

Auditors also found that 33 of the misclassified buildings in Queens had been inspected by DOF assessors within the last three years – raising questions about the agency’s training and inspection process.

City not responsible for filing fraudulent deed

From the Daily News:

An elderly Manhattan woman whose family homestead in Queens was stolen through deed fraud has no right to sue the city or the City Registrar for damages, a Queens judge ruled Friday.

Supreme Court Justice Kevin Kerrigan said that Jennifer Merin, 72, cannot sue for negligence because the City Registrar has no obligation and no authority under law to make sure that the deeds it accepts for filing in all five boroughs are legitimate.

Merin's lawyer, Christopher Campbell, whose law firm DLA Piper is representing Merin for free, said they will appeal.

"The judge seems not to acknowledge our (argument) that the city failed to follow its own rules in processing this deed,” he said.

“Deeds are supposed to have metes and bounds. This deed was completely blank on that. The previous owner is supposed to be the seller. This had a different name entirely. And this house was given away for free. All of these things should have been red flags,” he said.

Van Bramer bills target sidewalk blockers

From the Times Ledger:

Majority Leader Van Bramer’s bills will hit businesses where it hurts by increasing fines and allowing the Department of Consumer Affairs to revoke the business licenses of repeat offenders.

The first bill, Intro 1179-2016, makes parking vehicles in a sidewalk or crosswalk a violation for the following types of DCA-licensed businesses: used car dealers, parking garages and lots, tow companies, and car washes. The bill states the commissioner will suspend or revoke the license of businesses found to be in violation more than twice in one year. The second bill, Intro 1180-2016, directs the commissioner of Finance to implement increasing penalties for repeat violators.

This is all well and good, but have you ever tried to get DCA to inspect a business? You'd be better off calling NYPD.

Getting building classification correct gets city more money

From the Daily News:

The city risks losing out on $2 million in property tax money because of mistakes by the Finance Department in classifying buildings, an audit by city Controller Scott Stringer charges.

The audit found that 197 buildings in Brooklyn were wrongly classified as residential when most of their space was used for commercial purposes — so most of them should have been taxed at a higher rate.

If the buildings aren’t reclassified, the city will miss out on $2.09 million in potential tax earnings over five years, Stringer claims.

Next go after the 2-family homes rented as 3 or more units.

Hundreds of deed fraud cases under investigation

From the Daily News:

The city is dealing with a spate of cases where crooks swipe homes from under the owner’s nose through deed fraud schemes, officials said Monday.

The Department of Finance is pursuing 525 open investigations involving 671 properties across the five boroughs, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens, according to the agency’s testimony to a City Council hearing.

The thefts involve either outright forgery - where a deed to change ownership is filed with a fake signature - or scams where homeowners are talked into signing over their property, often on the promise of help with a delinquent mortgage or other financial trouble.

Issuing fines easy; collecting is not

From Capital New York:

City Hall is owed nearly $1.6 billion in uncollected debt from fines and tickets, nearly half of which comes from related penalties and not the actual summonses themselves, a new report reveals.

The initial fines adjudicated by the Environmental Control Board, which handles summonses for 13 city agencies, amount to close to $483 million. Default penalties for failing to attend subsequent judicial hearings top $709 million, and interest totals more than $386 million.

Those figures are laid out in a recent, first-of-its-kind report from the city Department of Finance, which unveiled extensive details about the potential revenue that has long eluded city coffers.

The total of $1.58 billion the city has yet to collect stems from 1,456,919 tickets that were never paid.

Deed fraud is big business

From the NY Times:

A review by The New York Times of several dozen cases, and interviews with lawyers, prosecutors and others knowledgeable about fraudulent deed transfers, suggests they are accelerating even as officials struggle to address them. The city’s Department of Finance said it was investigating 120 cases, many of them hard to crack because of the role played by LLCs, officials said. Underscoring the rising alarm over the problem, the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, and the Brooklyn borough president, Eric L. Adams, held a forum last month to warn property owners about it.

Deed thieves often scan legal notices for mortgages in arrears, typically targeting properties like Ms. Campbell’s that are in poor repair or abandoned. Vulnerable homeowners — including older and disabled adults — are sometimes tricked into signing over their properties, while believing they are getting financial relief.

In other cases, signatures are simply forged on deeds. The thieves, meanwhile, hide behind inscrutable mazes of limited liability companies, rented post office boxes and fake addresses.

2 guys stole a bunch of houses

From the Daily News:

Two Long Island men stole nine houses in Brooklyn and Queens and then either rented them out or sold them, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Danny Noble, 45, and Romelo Gray, 37, went to the city Finance Department and filed false documents to turn over the titles of seven Brooklyn addresses and two others in Queens, Brooklyn DA Kenneth Thompson said.

From June 29, 2010 to March 31, 2015, Noble and Gray allegedly stole homes in Fort Greene, Canarsie, Bushwick, East New York, Jamaica and Hollis that were either vacated or rarely used.

They are charged with conspiracy, criminal possession of stolen property, grand larceny and falsifying business records.

A lot of deeds have been stolen

From DNA Info:

Since spring 2014, the city sheriff’s office, which is part of the Finance Department, has made combating deed theft a top investigative priority.

Sheriff Joseph Fucito and the Finance Department stepped up their vigilance after a series of high-profile stories exposed the ease with which scammers could register deeds in city records.

Now the Finance Department flags any deed transfers that are filed with defective information and sends them to the sheriff’s investigators.

Between July 1, 2014, and April 30, 2015, the sheriff’s office received a total of 755 complaints of suspected deed thefts — with the Finance Department sending 597 of them. More than 150 came from individual people filing complaints.

The sheriff has so far opened criminal investigations into more than 100 of those complaints and more than a half dozen people have been arrested.

Woman mistakenly gets car boot 4 times

From CBS 2:

A case of mistaken car identity has led to intense frustration for a Queens woman whose car keeps getting the boot.

As CBS2’s Weijia Jiang reported, when Brigitta Wareham walks to her car, “I have knots in my stomach every time.”

She said she is sick over the thought of having her car booted again.

“I’m mad. I’m worse than frustrated,” she said.

New York City boots cars when owners owe $350 or more in unpaid parking tickets. But Wareham owes nothing.

Yet in less than two years, the Sheriff’s Office has booted her car four times by mistake, Jiang reported.

“I want that clear – by mistake. I didn’t have any tickets, and don’t have any tickets, and they did it by mistake,” Wareham said.

The city’s Department of Finance oversees parking violations. A spokesperson said Wareham is the victim of “human error.”

Most parking tickets now fought online

From CBS New York:

Technology is a two-way street when it comes to parking violations in New York City.

As CBS2’s Tony Aiello reported, high-tech tools allow the city to write more and more tickets. But they also make fighting a ticket you think is unfair a little easier.

At New York City Parking Court, the waiting room is often mostly empty these days, and the hearing rooms are hardly ever crowded. Like so much of life, the process of fighting a parking ticket has moved online.

“On the Web is probably one of the easiest and most efficient ways to have it,” said Kevin Timoney of the New York City Department of Finance.

Timoney said about 50 percent of ticket adjudications now take place online, with a system that makes it easy to upload evidence to argue your case. For instance, a scan of a Muni-Meter receipt or a picture of a parking sign may easily be uploaded.

Everything will be reviewed by an administrative law judge sworn to be impartial.

“Take as many pictures – overkill is better than underkill,” said Administrative Law Judge Frank Reyes. “Submit as many items as you think is necessary.”

Time to bend over again!

From the Daily News:

The city’s hot real estate market led to a whopping 9% hike on assessed property values, which will likely force some homeowners to fork over more in taxes.

The Finance Department released its preliminary tax assessments on Thursday, with most of the nearly double-digit growth the result of strong real estate sales.

Another 2% was attributed to new construction — which includes a Bronx boom.

The city uses the assessment numbers to gauge how much people will pay in taxes.

According to the city’s estimates, market values on class 1 properties — primarily one, two and three family homes — rose 7%.

Market values on condo and cooperatives went up by 11%, according to the department.

One simple paper is all it takes to steal someone's property

Eyewitness News explains how easy it is to steal someone's property.

And the NY Post has this:

A Manhattan woman claims an ex-con stole her family home in Queens by filing a phony deed with the city and moving in.

Now Jennifer Merin is battling in court to remove the convicted armed robber, Darrell Beatty, 49, and his sons, Darrell Kash Beatty, 25, and DeShaun Beatty, 22, from the three-bedroom Tudor she says they snatched in February.

“It just devastates me,” Merin, an online film critic, said as she looked at cherished family heirlooms — photos, a circa-1920 bed frame, vintage suitcases, classic television sets, a smashed 6-foot vase — piled like trash in the garage of the Laurelton home.

Merin said her Russian and Ukrainian grandparents moved into the new row house on 141st Avenue in 1931 and raised her mother and her mother’s two siblings there.

The family filled the home with treasures from around the world. She inherited it several decades ago after her mother died.

“The house was maintained basically as a sanctuary to my family,” said Merin, who paid insurance, taxes and utility bills on the property and would visit every few months.

She never rented it, and kept her 1992 Subaru Outback parked there, she said.

A spike in her February water bill, which she got on May 27, first alerted her to illegal occupants. She called 911, but when cops went to the house, Beatty told them he was the legal resident.

She went to investigate herself and was “horrified” to find the locks changed and her car missing. Peering through the windows, she saw most of her possessions were also gone.

She called cops again. But with no one answering the door, they advised Merin to take the matter to court.

Merin contacted the Finance Department, which oversees the city register. Officials confirmed the 2013 deed transfer was fraudulent and updated the deed with Merin’s name on June 4.

A Finance source said that the case is being jointly investigated by the Queens District Attorney’s Office and the city sheriff and that it “could be part of a larger ring” of deed scammers.

Landlords owe a heap of dough to NYC

From the NY Post:

The owners of 20,898 buildings owe New York City more than $555 million in back taxes, emergency repairs and water bills, according to the Department of Finance.

While the dollar figure enough to pay for pre-K, Mayor de Blasio’s pet project, it is actually 24 percent lower than in May 2013, according to the 60-day lien sale list released by city department to The Post.

The number of buildings 60 days or more behind on the tax and repair bills fell by 10 percent, the list showed.

The decline in the number of buildings in arrears and the amount owed to the city, experts said, is the result of the current feeding frenzy by the real estate industry to buy and redevelop properties.

That business activity is bringing fresh capital and investment to areas where previous owners were unable to keep up with debts and repairs on aging stock, the experts said.

The real amount owed to the city could be higher. The city typically culls properties with high lien-to-value ratios, or other issues, such as government-owned land, before producing the list.

Civic calls for landlords to be forced to pay up

From the Times Ledger:

The Juniper Park Civic Association says it is time the city abandon its tactic of trying to fine landlords who fail to address building violations.

The civic association sent a slew of photos and a memo to the de Blasio administration outlining properties the association said have racked up thousands of dollars in fines for city Department of Building violations yet are not compelled to address the infractions.

At the association’s Feb. 27 meeting, Juniper Park Civic Association President Robert Holden held up enlarged photos of properties with graffitied commercial vehicles parked in the yard or a fence towering above a residential street.

“DOB is doing its job,” he said, emphasizing that many landlords had been fined for the infractions. “We’re calling on the mayor and the Department of Finance to go after these guys.”

For instance, the owner of 57-65 75th St., near the Elmhurst-Maspeth border, has four open violations with the city Environmental Control Board and $6,100 in unpaid fines. Yet the association said the same commercial trucks that were sited in all four infractions for a violation of the residential zoning code remain a common sight.

Holden said ideally the city would hire contractors to go in and fix infractions and then bill owners for the work.

De Blasio’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Ratner wants more tax breaks

From DNA Info:

The developer of the Atlantic Yards project has already gotten at least $761 million in government subsidies — and now it wants even more fiscal breaks.

Forest City Ratner filed a lawsuit last week demanding the city's Department of Finance and the Tax Commissioner slash their appraisal of one of its Atlantic Yards properties. Reducing the appraisal would drastically cut how much FCR pays to the city in the future as part of a deal to build there.

The land in question is known as block 1129 in the city ledger and encompasses the southern side of the Atlantic Yards project. Currently it serves as a parking lot, but FCR eventually plans to build high-rises on it.

The Finance Department put the block’s market value at $11.2 million for its current fiscal year, which began July 1. But FCR says in a lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court that it’s only worth about $1.6 million.

FCR wants the court to lower the Tax Commissioner’s and the Finance Department’s final determination.

Mistaken tax breaks

From the Daily News:

These tax snafus were truly close to home.

Bumbling city Finance Department watchdogs have for years been erroneously giving more than $2,000 in tax breaks to the owners of an office building and three parking lots — including one rented by the department itself.

The state School Tax Relief Program is supposed to give only homeowners up to a $300 tax rebate on their primary residence each year.

But the Finance Department messed up and has been giving the sweeteners to owners of three parking lots in Queens and Brooklyn, and an office building on the East Side of Manhattan, records show.

Incredibly, one of the Queens parking lots — at 144-02 95th Ave. in Jamaica — is being used by the borough’s team of tax assessors.

“This is going on right under our noses,” one assessor fumed.