As part of our ongoing investigation into how the City's government operates, today we are taking a look at corruption, from the Department of Education to the NYPD. Through the Freedom of Information Act, we obtained records from the Conflicts of Interest Bureau of every settled conflict of interest case from the past twenty years. These cases resulted in a City employee either paying fines, receiving salary cuts or in some cases losing their positions.
Our first chart shows the total number of COIB cases per agency. The DOE leads the pack by far, but this is to be expected: they employ more people than any other agency in the city. Notably, the city's second largest employer, the NYPD, is WAY down the list, clocking in at eight corruption cases in the past twenty years. Of course, this makes sense, since we know the NYPD has never been called corrupt. Nope, not once.
The second chart shows the number of corruption cases per 1000 employees, and tells a very different story. Here, we see the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner are leading the way, averaging eight and nine conflicts of interest per 1000 employees over the past twenty years. Sanitation, Citywide Administration Services and Design and Construction were also top offenders, averaging around seven cases per 1000 employees. Again, NYPD looks clean on this chart, averaging less than one COIB case per 1000 employees.
Conflict of interest cases are generally the less serious corruption cases. And we can't rely solely on these numbers — for example, many NYPD cases are probably handled by Internal Affairs and never reach the COIB. But most other major cases are handled by the Department of Investigation, who we've requested data from them well. We'll be bringing you our findings as the information comes in.
NB. If you're interested in getting a flavor for what these cases are about, you can read this helpful summary of each case offered by the COIB. You can also peruse the data we FOILed here:
