{"id":572635,"date":"2010-05-20T15:09:01","date_gmt":"2010-05-20T19:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c60fd53ef0133ee105cc0970b"},"modified":"2010-05-20T15:09:01","modified_gmt":"2010-05-20T19:09:01","slug":"city-ig-says-minority-women-firms-shorted-15-percent-on-contracts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/572635","title":{"rendered":"City IG says minority, women firms shorted 15 percent on contracts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Posted by John Byrne<\/em> at 2:08 p.m.<\/p>\n<p>Minority- and women-owned businesses were paid $19 million less than they were supposed to get under city contracts two years ago because of widespread fraud, abuse and mismanagement of the city&#8217;s affirmative action program, according to a report released today by the city inspector general\u2019s office.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>That represented a 15 percent shortfall during 2008, the report stated. If that kind of shortfall were extended over 15 years, starting in 1995, minority- and women-owned businesses would have lost $400 million, it concluded.\n<\/p>\n<p>Widespread fraud, abuse and mismanagement of the city&#8217;s affirmative action contract program caused minority- and women-owned businesses to be paid 15 percent less than they were supposed to get in a recent analysis of construction contracts by the city Inspector General&#8217;s Office, a shortfall that could reach $400 million over the past 15 years.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>Inspector General Joseph Ferguson criticized the city in a report released today for not tracking actual payments to the firms that have won city contracts as part of a program started in the 1980s to diversify the companies getting public work.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>&quot;The city&#8217;s failure to collect all relevant data, its inconsistent application of the program&#8217;s rules and regulations, and a lack of cooperation between the user departments and the Department of Procurement Services have all contributed to the program&#8217;s poor administration,&quot; Ferguson writes.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>City officials should consider directly paying subcontractors to prevent firms from using minority-owned &quot;fronts&quot; to get city work, then cutting them out of the actual projects, Ferguson writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Posted by John Byrne at 2:08 p.m. Minority- and women-owned businesses were paid $19 million less than they were supposed to get under city contracts two years ago because of widespread fraud, abuse and mismanagement of the city&#8217;s affirmative action program, according to a report released today by the city inspector general\u2019s office.That represented a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3992,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-572635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3992"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}