It takes money to make money, as the old saying goes, and, apparently, it also takes money — as much as $53 million — to give money away.
Earlier this month, The Post broke the story that Mayor Adams is giving out pre-paid cash cards to migrants.
Unusually for the mayor, Adams didn’t publicize this story himself, and his administration has for nearly a month failed to correct several public misperceptions about it.
One misperception is that the program allows the city to give out just $50 million to migrants.
No wonder the mayor has been reticent.
This debit-card program — if you read the actual contract — has the potential to become an open-ended, multi-billion-dollar Bermuda Triangle of disappearing, untraceable cash, used for any purpose.
It will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID check, no restrictions and no fraud control.
When The Post exposed the mayor’s debit-card program earlier this month, the mayor’s office spun it as a money-saving program, to solve a problem: migrants staying in hotels don’t eat all their food.
DocGo, the city’s no-bid “emergency” contractor to provide migrants with three meals a day, throws away up to 5,000 meals daily, wasting $7.2 million a year.
Some food is inedible — expired or rotten — and other food doesn’t meet migrants’ dietary needs.
Providing mass-scale meals competently and with options for specific needs — halal, kosher, vegan, non-gluten — isn’t that hard: the school system does it, airlines do it, hospitals and jails do it.
It wouldn’t be that difficult for the city to solve this problem: on-site city auditors could refuse to pay for meals that are objectively inedible, with visible mold, for example, or with expired labeling.
Instead of assuring that it’s existing no-bid “emergency” contractor fulfills its duty to provide edible food, however, the Adams administration has solved its problem by retaining a new no-bid “emergency” contractor — to provide a service with far more scope for waste, fraud, and abuse than stale sandwiches: giving out potentially billions of dollars of hard cash, few questions asked.
Which vendors did the city’s Housing Preservation & Development consider for this contract, as qualified to provide this complex financial service?
New York City is home to hundreds of top-tier financial-services and public-benefits providers, a dream of a competitive bidding pool, to ensure that the city gets a good price, as well as strong protections against fraud and abuse.
But HPD considered only one: Newark-based Mobility Capital Finance, which also has an office in Harlem.
MoCaFi was founded by Wole Coaxum, a former managing director at JPMorgan Chase, who said the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 inspired him to serve the “underbanked” and “narrow the racial wealth gap.”
How did HPD choose Mobility Capital? The contract makes it quite clear: MoCaFi was “referred to HPD by City Hall.”
What kind of experience did MoCaFi bring to this complex endeavor?
None. As HPD helpfully notes, on a “listing of prior / related emergency large contracts,” MoCaFi is “a new provider of emergency services for HPD.”
MoCaFi’s only city experience, HPD notes, is small-scale support of the city’s participatory-budget program.
The company’s broader nationwide experience is as a “platform” for pre-paid third-party debit cards and bank accounts, marketed to minorities.
The only clue is from a stray off-the-cuff comment Adams made at a reception earlier this month, calling MoCaFi a minority business “that we met on the campaign trail. . . . Little did we know that God is going to say there’s going to be a crisis, you’re going to have to meet them. . . . And it’s going to cost us money” to “put investment . . . in our community.”
A year ago, the Adams administration was already eager to find something for MoCaFi to do.
Last year, the director of the mayor’s fund to advance New York City — a slush fund powered by anonymous private donors — raised at one of the fund’s board meetings the concept of “an upcoming partnership with the mayor’s office . . . and MoCaFi . . . on a universal basic income project”: that is, giving poorer New Yorkers (not migrants) cash.
Coaxum seems to have become part of the mayor’s orbit, and even provided a quote to an official City Hall press release praising Adams’ founding of a new “Office of Engagement.”
