David Yassky for New York City Comptroller

What Is the NYC Comptroller?

The Comptroller is the taxpayers’ watchdog, serving as the City’s Chief Financial Officer; fiscal auditor; investment advisor and enforcement agent protecting working people. Second only to the Mayor in terms of the scope and responsibilities of the office, the Comptroller has financial oversight over virtually all city agencies and spending.

The New York City Comptroller is the City’s independently elected Chief Financial Officer. Because the Comptroller is elected directly by the people of New York, he or she serves only their interests, acting as the taxpayers’ watchdog and their voice on city spending decisions. The Comptroller is responsible for making sure that programs run efficiently; agencies act responsibly and are held accountable if they do not; all business is done with complete transparency; and that all government officials are held to the highest standards of integrity and ethics.

To achieve this, the Comptroller monitors the City’s finances and advises the public (and elected officials) on the state of those finances, allowing for objective decisions on how to best protect taxpayer funds. The Comptroller audits city agencies and specific programs within those agencies to identify waste and to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of each program. In each year’s audits, the Comptroller identifies millions of dollars in wasteful spending and abuse, forwarding information on criminal activity to the appropriate District Attorney when necessary.

Beyond traditional programmatic spending, New York City also spends over nine billion dollars per year on procurement contracts, buying a broad array of goods and services. The Comptroller reviews and registers all city contracts, making sure that proper procurement rules were followed, and ensuring that agencies and vendors are meeting their responsibilities to the taxpayers.

The Comptroller also oversees the pension funds for city employees, investing the funds on behalf of over 500,000 current and future retirees. While the Comptroller is legally bound to generate the best possible rate of return, in recent years, Comptrollers have found that they could maintain earnings while using the investment power of the funds to promote other goals such as building affordable housing, helping small businesses, encouraging companies to be more environmentally conscious and putting pressure on terror-sponsoring states like Iran and the Sudan to change their ways.

To protect the rights of working people, the Comptroller serves as the enforcement officer for prevailing wage laws in New York City. This means that the Comptroller has the authority to enforce the law if unscrupulous contractors try to pay working people less than they are legally entitled to for work performed on many city-financed projects. In this way, the Comptroller has recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages for cheated workers, and debarred guilty contractors from doing business with the city for five years.

This combination of responsibilities – spending oversight, investment, economic analysis and contract review - makes the Comptroller one of the City’s leading economic officers. He or she is in a unique position to build the City’s economy by directly creating jobs through smart investments; demanding innovation and accountability in the City’s traditional economic development programs; and providing independent analysis on impending economic challenges that the city will face.