By Joseph Hernandez
New York is losing billions of dollars every year — not because we lack resources, but because we lack oversight. Fraud, waste, and mismanagement have become routine across the state’s largest programs, and Albany has grown dangerously comfortable looking the other way. The result is predictable: taxpayers pay more, public services deliver less, and retirees face unnecessary financial risk.
The State Comptroller is supposed to be the independent watchdog who prevents this. Instead, the office has become slow, reactive, and outdated — and New Yorkers are paying the price.
We already know where the biggest vulnerabilities lie, and they are the same programs with the largest budgets.
Start with Medicaid, the largest program in the entire state budget. New York spends approximately $97.9 billion a year on Medicaid — more than most states spend on their entire budgets. Recent audits found over $1.2 billion in improper payments for individuals who may not even live in New York. That is not a minor oversight — that is structural failure. When a $97 billion program operates without real-time verification or strong eligibility controls, billions will continue to slip through the cracks.
The next major exposure is Unemployment Insurance, a system responsible for billions in annual benefit payments. New York recently had to pay off nearly $7 billion in UI debt — a direct consequence of fraud, identity theft, and outdated technology. During the pandemic, criminals stole billions nationally through fake or synthetic identities. New York’s aging systems made it one of the easiest targets. Those vulnerabilities remain today.
The vulnerabilities continue inside our education system. New York’s public schools — including the New York City Department of Education — operate on tens of billions of dollars annually, with billions more flowing through vendor contracts for busing, special-education services, construction, facilities, and consulting. In multiple audits, 20–30% of sampled payments lacked proper documentation. That kind of error rate, across a budget of this size, implies statewide losses well into the hundreds of millions — possibly more.
Statewide contracting presents another enormous risk. New York awards tens of billions of dollars in contracts every year across agencies — IT contracts, infrastructure projects, consulting agreements, and outsourced services. Weak vendor verification, duplicate invoicing, inflated pricing, and “ghost work” happen because the state relies on outdated review systems. In 2025, there is no excuse for reviewing multi-billion-dollar contracts with manual spreadsheets and fragmented oversight.
And then there is the MTA, with an annual operating and capital budget exceeding $20 billion. The MTA’s construction costs are consistently 4–6 times higher than comparable projects globally. Cost overruns, opaque billing practices, and poorly monitored contract amendments are not occasional problems — they are embedded in the structure. If New York does not modernize MTA financial oversight, taxpayers will continue to subsidize inefficiency at historic levels.
This is where the State Comptroller must lead.
Not with after-the-fact reports or political press releases, but with real-time, technology-driven oversight that detects fraud before taxpayer money is lost. Federal agencies already use powerful tools like Palantir, SAS Fraud Framework, LexisNexis identity verification, and AI-driven contract auditing platforms. These technologies are not experimental — they are the global standard. New York, with one of the largest budgets in America, should have adopted them years ago.
As Comptroller, I will make that the standard on Day One. We will launch real-time monitoring across Medicaid and unemployment programs, audit DOE and school vendor payments with modern data tools, scrutinize every statewide contract with AI pattern detection, and bring full transparency to MTA capital spending. And when fraud is uncovered, we will work directly with state and federal prosecutors to ensure that wrongdoers — whether corporations or individuals — are held fully accountable.
For taxpayers, this means billions saved.
For retirees, it means a safer pension system and greater long-term security.
For New York, it means a government that finally treats every public dollar with the seriousness it deserves.
Fraud is not inevitable. Waste is not normal. Mismanagement is not a cost of doing business. These failures persist only because no one has been willing or able to confront them with urgency, independence, and modern tools.
That changes on Day One. Because accountability is not a slogan — it is a promise.