After receiving a no-bid contract worth nearly $4 million in 2002 Supreme Evaluation, Inc., spent more than $150,000 between 2006 and 2008 lobbying the Department of Education. According to the department’s record of recent contracts, they were awarded multiple contracts worth about $13 million in 2007. According to David N. Ross, executive director of the department’s Division of Contracts and Purchasing, their contracts are for services related to No Child Left Behind, the vendors for which are certified and chosen by the state.

SourceCorp, Inc., a company that specializes in helping companies and government agencies make their offices more efficient, spent $90,000 lobbying the Department of Education about procurement in 2007, after being awarded a $2.2 million no-bid contract in 2005 and being the winning bidder on a contract worth nearly $1 million in 2006. In 2008–one year after they lobbied the department–SourceCorp was again the winning bidder on a multi-year contract worth almost $1 million.

Lobbying a city agency and receiving contracts from that agency is perfectly legal. And lobbying an agency does not always yield tangible results like a contract. We found many companies and organizations that lobbied the DOE about procurement decisions did so even after they had already received a no-bid contract.

Several entities, however, lobbied the department in the same year of or year prior to being awarded a no-bid contract include: Beginning with Children Foundation, a charter school operator; The College Board, which administers the SAT’s and AP tests as well as operates charter schools in the city; Sports and Arts in Schools, which now operates many of the after-school programs operated in city public schools; and New Visions for Public Schools, a small schools operator that has also provided consulting services to the department.

Aside from no-bid vendors, one of the things that we found most interesting was lobbying activities by operators of schools. Considering all of the controversy surrounding charter schools in New York City right now, it would be interesting for someone to search the lobbying database for other charter school operators and see how many of them have lobbied the City Council or the Department of Education in recent years.

“The past seven years we’ve swung open the doors of city government,” he said.  “Giving the public the essential information it needs to make sure that we are living up to our obligations and responsibilities to New Yorkers.”

We could not agree more.

But unfortunately, this has not been our experience with the Department of Education.  There, transparency has been – at best – elusive.  Some of the major brick walls we’ve hit include:

Little access to vital public records, including contracts.  According to New York’s  Freedom of Information law , records should be made readily available to the public to review and at minimal cost.   Our requests for electronic copies of contracts have continuously been denied–and even if DOE decided to permit us access to paper copies, we would be charged $0.25 per copy.

Our investigation requires we review dozens – if not hundreds – of contracts. That’s easily thousands of pages.  At $0.25 per page to copy, this quickly becomes economically infeasible, essentially denying the meaning of the Freedom of Information Law.

Lack of reading rooms. We would not have needed the paper copies if there were  reading rooms where we can peruse contracts. The Freedom of Information Law says that government agencies should provide reading rooms where records are on hand and accessible to the public.

Unduly long processing time. There is tremendous lag time between when we file a FOIL, and when we receive a response.  By law, the DOE should take five days to respond to a FOIL request, and under 20 days to produce the document – or give a detailed response for the delay.  While we’ve been notified that our request will take longer to grant, we have not been told why, or how much longer it will take.

Problematic VENDEX filing system. By law, vendors vying for city contracts must have completed VENDEX Questionnaires. Once completed by the vendor, the forms are then supposed to be filed with the Mayor’s Office of Contracts. These filings, which include information on the vendor and its principals, are openly available to the public.  However, when we went to review these files, we discovered that only a fraction of the Department of Education’s VENDEX forms had been filed with the Mayor’s Office of Contracts.  When we called the DOE to ask where we could go to review the remaining VENDEX, we were told that the DOE does not maintain their own VENDEX system, so most of the documents are simply unavailable for review.

These public access issues aren’t unique to our team.  ParentAdvocates.org blogger and Rubber Room reporter Betsy Combier reported having to wait as long as two years for a return on her FOIL requests.  And even then, she only finally received a reply after she filed a complaint.

Even Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum has had problems with Department of Education FOIL requests.  A source in the Public Advocate’s office told us just yesterday that the members of Public Advocate’s staff have also had to wait for nearly two years for a reply to some of their FOIL requests.

VENDEX is a database that contains information for every city contract and information regarding ownership, financial capacity, business structure, affiliations and involvement in government investigations on the vendors that do business with the city. Last week, we combed through hundreds of Department of Education VENDEX files at the Mayor’s Office on Contracts.

The filings were wildly incomplete, missing hundreds of vendors and contracts. Never mind that the VENDEX database for the Department of Education only went back to 2006. But we managed to walk away with one lead.

Supreme Evaluation, Inc., a company that conducts assessments and evaluations for the New York City public school system, had a “caution” assigned to it. According to this document, in 2006, the Office of Special Investigation looked into allegations of “improper recruitment and enrollment of students in supplemental educational services.”

We requested the investigation report from the Special Commissioner of Investigation for the New York City School District, but have yet to receive it.

We did, however, obtain the VENDEX questionnaire, along with a letter written by the chief administrator for the Department of Education’s Division of Contracts and Purchasing, Jay Miller, to the president of Supreme, Neil Maron.

In his letter, Miller wrote, “the DOE believes you now understand the importance of training your employees on policies and procedures as well as the need for strict observance of the DOE’s code of ethics.”

Yet, even while apparently contesting the findings of the investigation for ethics violations, Supreme lobbied the DOE and the Mayor’s office, and was subsequently awarded a contract worth over $11.7 million, as well as two contracts worth a little under $1 million each.

And that’s not all.

According to our database—compiled through records we obtained from the Comptroller’s office and from the Department of Education Web site—since 2002, the Department of Education has awarded Supreme over $17 million in contracts. Additionally, in 2002, Supreme was awarded a no-bid contract for $187,200 for “supplemental educational services.” By the end of the three-year contract, though, the Department of Education paid Supreme nearly $4 million.

We’ve called Supreme several times, but no one was either available to comment or willing to comment.

We’ll keep you updated with what we learn when we receive the investigation report and any other information.

We whittled these contracts out of a longer list, which we received from the City Comptroller’s office in December. You can take a look at the longer list here. We were surprised to find that, according to this list, some of the contracts listed on the Department of Education’s own website as having been exceptions to competitive bidding were not among the no-bid contracts on file with the City Comptroller.

We’re hoping you’ll take a look at both of these spreadsheets and let us know if anything jumps out at you or reminds you of something that you might have heard or read about suspicious contracting or spending. We look forward to your input. Happy hunting!

Legally, all contracts are supposed to be registered with the City Comptroller.  Strangely, there are discrepancies between our two lists. And even at 500 plus contracts total, some of our sources have indicated the list is still a bit sparse.

We’re hoping that anyone with insider knowledge can give us some tips on which companies or people we should be honing in on within our investigation.  We’ll be updating periodically to give an idea of our progress.