{ "id": "1991-january-newsday-report-pays-off", "slug": "1991-january-newsday-report-pays-off", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1991-january-newsday-report-pays-off.html", "year": 1991, "month": "January", "monthNum": 1, "headline": "Newsday Report Pays Off", "kicker": "", "author_name": "Tom Braden", "author_title": "Graduate student", "affiliation": "Missouri School of Journalism", "summary": "An investigation by New York Newsday revealed that the city owes $275 million in tax overpayments to property owners, highlighting the ease of uncovering bureaucratic errors using computer-assisted reporting.", "keywords": [ "tax refunds", "bureaucracy", "investigation" ], "topics": [ "Data & Databases", "Investigative Methods", "Business & Economy" ], "technologies": [ "Nine Track Express", "XDB" ], "full_text": "When New York Newsday reporter Penny Loeb called Aly Dadras to tell him that the city owed him at least $5,000, Dadras reacted with disbelief. And for good reason. Several months earlier, the New York City Department of Finance had told Dadras it was preparing to take over a house he owns in Queens for nonpayment of taxes.\n\nFor Dadras, an architect and professor at the New York University Institute of Technology who takes pride in his fastidious attention to bills, the Finance Department proceedings had come as a great shock.\n\nLoeb's computer analysis of city finance records set the record straight - for Dadras as well as hundreds of thousands of other property owners to whom, she discovered, the city owes as much as $275 million in overpayments on their real-estate, water and sewer taxes. So read the front page of Newsday on Jan. 7. Now Dadras awaits a check from the city, which has ceased pursuing his house. And city officials assure they will repay all other residents owed money. Loeb said that to date their progress has been slow. The city says it will take a month just to straighten out its records.\n\nBut it only took an instant for Loeb to know that she had a dynamite story. \"It just came so fast,\" she recalled recently. \"I remember looking at the result and thinking, wow, there it is. I was dumbfounded.\"\n\nSo were the property owners she called to notify of the city's malfeasance. They never knew they were owed money because the city isn't required to tell them. Thanks to Newsday, they are beginning to find out.\n\nNew York City residents have reacted to the story with outrage; and city officials, already smarting because of the sorry state of city finances, are scratching their heads and wringing their hands.\n\n\"I was disturbed by learning about it,\" said Carol O'Cleireacain, the city's finance commissioner, when she discovered the secrets contained in her department's records.\n\nAsked why the city never notified the taxpayer to whom it owes money, one city official replied: \"The simple answer to that is we are not required by law to let anybody know about credits.\"\n\nIn his State of the City address, given shortly after the story appeared on the streets, Mayor David N. Dinkins took a conciliatory tone: \"Our people have a right to expect that their government will be both honest enough to refund tax overpayments and caring enough to do it quickly.\"\n\nLoeb, meanwhile, expressed less surprise at this most recent example of the city's bureaucracy gone awry than at the ease with which the story unfolded using a personal computer. Once she had obtained the computer tape for $225 from the Finance Department under the New York State Freedom of Information Law, it took her just one month to analyze the information and report and write the story.\n\nThe computer tape contains information on credits for all affected properties in New York City's five boroughs - a total of nearly 1.5 million records. The tape also has a code for the type of credit owed (whether real estate, sewer or water) and the type of building for which owners are deserving of money. If the credit was tied to vacant land, the computer tape identifies it as such.\n\nLoeb used NineTrack Express to filter in just a half hour only those records with credits for property owners, leaving more than 500,000 records to analyze in XDB. The file consumed 40 megabytes of memory.\n\nAside from identifying the properties' locations, giving the borough, block and lot, the computer tape has two open balance fields, each of which represent credits and delinquencies for two different payment periods.\n\nThese two fields contain figures that either represent credits the city owes residents or delinquencies owed to the city. Queries in XDB took anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour.\n\nLoeb expressed less surprise at the city bureaucracy gone awry than at the ease with which the story unfolded using a personal computer.\n\nThe tape does not identify property owners by name, so Loeb tracked them down, matching the borough, block and lot to owners listed in real estate books.\n\nMany of the bilked taxpayers were skeptical when Loeb reached them by telephone. \"They didn't believe me,\" she said. \"Others thanked me, but they didn't want their names in the paper.\"\n\nIn producing the story Loeb confronted more formidable challenges than publicity-weary city residents.\n\nShe was asked near deadline by her editors to find out how many property owners were owed money. Since more than one credit can accrue to a single property, this was impossible to tell by looking at the tape. So Loeb took a 10 percent sample, and counted the records - about 1,000 of them - by hand.\n\n\"I couldn't believe I was doing a computer-assisted story on deadline,\" she said.", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "pre-v2", "extracted_at": "", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1991-july-tax-problems-in-new-york-city-again", "score": 0.328 }, { "slug": "1992-march-loeb-selected-for-scripps-howard-award", "score": 0.289 }, { "slug": "1992-february-newsday-uncovers-nyc-tax-billing-mess", "score": 0.254 }, { "slug": "2000-june-covering-tax-assessments", "score": 0.241 }, { "slug": "1997-october-analyzing-property-tax", "score": 0.211 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1991-january-newsday-report-pays-off.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1991-january-newsday-report-pays-off.json" }