By Eduardo Bacci, The Investigative Journal
The state and federal records now sitting on top of New York’s asylum-seeker spending tell a single, unflattering story: the largest municipal emergency procurement in the city’s modern history was run with so little oversight that, more than two years after the first contracts were signed, it has produced a federal corruption indictment in Brooklyn, audit findings that 80 percent of one major contractor’s payments were inadequately supported, and a parallel federal report concluding that a $529 million sole-source migrant-housing contract was awarded just three days after an unsolicited proposal arrived.
The cumulative bill keeps rising. According to the most recent Asylum Seeker Spending Report from the New York State Comptroller’s office, New York City recorded $1.47 billion in asylum-seeker expenses in fiscal year 2023, $3.75 billion in FY 2024, and $3.02 billion in FY 2025, with another $947.4 million booked through January 31, 2026. State spending under the same emergency response totaled $2.62 billion over the same window. New York City Hall projects another $1.4 billion in FY 2026 and $1.2 billion in FY 2027 before the response winds down.
What that money bought — and who it bought from — is now the subject of overlapping audits, an unsealed federal indictment, and a still-active public corruption probe.
340 contracts, $5.7 billion, and almost no competition
The structural problem was identified more than two years before any defendant was charged. In a February 2024 report, then-City Comptroller Brad Lander disclosed that, as of November 2023, the Comptroller’s Office had identified “340 unique asylum-seeker contracts held across 14 different City agencies, representing an estimated contract value of $5.7 billion.” Most were procured through emergency authority that bypassed competitive bidding.
Lander’s office compared the four highest-value emergency staffing deals — with The Essey Group, SLSCO LP, Rapid Reliable Testing NY LLC (operating as DocGo), and a Garner Environmental Services master agreement — and found the kind of price dispersion that competitive procurement is supposed to eliminate. According to the report:
- SLSCO’s hourly rates for case managers were 237 percent higher than The Essey Group’s, and DocGo’s were 146 percent higher.
- SLSCO billed the city $201.06 per hour for off-site managers — about four times the rate DocGo charged and double the rate Garner charged for the same position.
- At one site alone — the Row Hotel in Midtown — using city employees instead of contractor staff would have produced approximately $50 million in annual savings, even after fringe benefits.
The Comptroller’s office concluded that “City agencies wound up soliciting multiple contracts without achieving the benefits of competitive pricing.” In December 2023, Lander revoked the blanket emergency-procurement authority that had been delegated to the mayor’s office in July 2022, requiring contract-by-contract review going forward.
The DocGo audit: phantom hotel rooms, unauthorized subcontractors, moldy rooms
The most granular look inside one of those emergency contracts came six months later. In an August 2024 audit, the Comptroller’s Office reviewed the first two months of invoices under the $432 million DocGo contract — a no-bid emergency agreement the Department of Housing Preservation and Development had executed in May 2023 over the Comptroller’s objections and which his office had announced it would audit in real time in October 2023.
The audit’s central finding: nearly 80 percent of the $13.8 million DocGo billed for May and June 2023 — about $11 million — was “inadequately supported and should be recouped.” The detail underneath that number is what investigators tend to call a paper trail. According to the audit:
- Auditors identified 40,219 hours of security work charged at $50 per hour above the contract’s allowable limit — about $2 million in overpayments, including $583,274 in DocGo profit, for security guards “that were not authorized when the costs were incurred.”
- The city paid DocGo “almost $1.7 million for vacant rooms in hotels with no occupancy during this two-month period,” of which DocGo collected $408,680 in commissions. The total: 9,874 unused hotel-room nights billed and paid.
- DocGo “used nearly 67 percent of the amount claimed for this period to pay unauthorized subcontractors,” submitting subcontractor approval forms for only 12 of 41 subcontractors. The single largest subcontract, listed at a maximum value of $42 million with Platinum Community Care, was never submitted for approval.
- Of 189 hotel rooms inspected, 80 percent had at least one documented deficiency, with auditors recording mold, water damage, peeling paint, roaches, bed bugs, and rats. Sixty-five percent of rooms inspected lacked a microwave; 35 percent lacked a refrigerator.
- DocGo “understaffed caseworkers by 1,670 hours for 82 days at 15 hotels and understaffed supervisors (social workers) by 4,693 hours for 317 days at 18 hotels.”
By June 12, 2024, the city had paid DocGo $181.9 million on the $432 million contract. The Comptroller’s office recommended that the Department of Housing Preservation and Development recoup at least $4.7 million in unallowable expenses, obtain documentation for another $6.3 million in inadequately supported payments, and conduct second-level reviews on every invoice paid to date. HPD’s written response said it would conduct another round of review and “recoup if necessary.” DocGo’s contract was not renewed.
From audit findings to federal indictments
The audit findings supplied the institutional pattern. Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York supplied the criminal case.
On March 31, 2026, prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging four men — Roberto Samedy, Jean Ronald Tirelus, Edouardo St. Fort, and Miguel Jorge — in connection with the operations of BHRAGS Home Care Corp., a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that, according to court filings and city procurement records, has received roughly $200 million in city contracts since 2022, including emergency contracts to operate migrant shelters.
According to the 20-page indictment summarized in court filings and reporting, Samedy, BHRAGS’s executive director, and Tirelus, its former board chairman, “exercised significant control over the operations and finances” of the nonprofit. Prosecutors allege they pocketed more than $1.3 million, including $800,000 that had been earmarked for “economic growth and affordable housing” in distressed Brooklyn neighborhoods, and that they received more than $200,000 in kickbacks in exchange for steering subcontracts to companies controlled by St. Fort and Jorge. St. Fort, a retired NYPD sergeant who owns Fort NYC Security, separately holds roughly $7 million in city shelter security contracts, most awarded on an emergency basis, according to records maintained by the city comptroller’s office.
Tirelus and Samedy face charges of wire fraud, embezzlement, bribery, and money laundering conspiracy, and face up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Tirelus, Samedy, and Jorge each pleaded not guilty at their initial appearance in federal court in Brooklyn and were released on bond; St. Fort, arrested in Boston, had not yet entered a plea at the time of arraignment. A BHRAGS Home Care spokesperson told reporters Samedy had been placed on administrative leave and that the organization is “fully cooperating with law enforcement.” Federal prosecutors have separately reviewed, according to a court-issued search warrant first reported by the Associated Press, whether two additional officials helped steer contracts to St. Fort’s company. No charges have been filed against either; one of the two was placed on leave by her employing office after the existence of the search warrant became public.
The federal mirror: a $529 million contract awarded in three days
The New York case is not unique. On February 10, 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General released audit A-03-22-00353, examining a $529 million sole-source contract that the Administration for Children and Families awarded to Family Endeavors, Inc. in 2021 to operate an emergency intake site for unaccompanied alien children.
The OIG’s findings track the New York pattern. According to the report, “ACF did not award the Endeavors 2021 sole source contract in accordance with Federal requirements.” The agency “awarded the sole source contract 3 days after receiving an unsolicited proposal from Endeavors,” conducted no documented pre-award price analysis, and did not evaluate whether Endeavors was a responsible contractor. ACF’s own internal estimate had been $245 million; the eventual contract value of $529 million was more than double that figure. A price analysis was finally completed three months after the contract had already been awarded. The OIG report concluded that “other, more qualified contractors may have been available to perform the duties of the contract at a lower cost to the Government.” ACF concurred with the inspector general’s recommendation.
What the record shows, and what remains open
Across the federal, state, and municipal layers, the public record now describes a coherent set of facts. New York City spent more than $9 billion on asylum-seeker services across four fiscal years using emergency procurement authority that, by the Comptroller’s own count, generated 340 contracts at 14 agencies. A representative sample of those contracts shows pricing dispersion of 100 to 240 percent for the same staffing categories, payments for hotel rooms that were never occupied, and subcontractor chains that the contracting agency never approved. A separate, parallel federal contracting track produced a $529 million sole-source award the HHS Inspector General has now formally determined was non-compliant with pre-award rules.
What remains open is the question of accountability. The Comptroller’s recommendations call for the city to recoup at least $11 million from DocGo and to substitute competitive procurement for emergency authority going forward. The federal indictment in Brooklyn is still in its early stages and the defendants are presumed innocent until proven otherwise. The HHS Inspector General’s recommendation to ACF — that the agency use the audit “to promote better contract planning and efficient use of resources” — remains, in OIG tracking, “open unimplemented,” with an expected update in August 2026.
For taxpayers, the lesson is older than the asylum-seeker emergency itself: when public agencies set aside the competitive procurement framework, the savings on “speed” tend to show up later as audit findings, recoupments, and, in at least one Brooklyn case now before a federal jury, criminal charges.