Chair Stevens Questions SYEP Debit Card Fraud Prevention

Uh when it comes to contract processing and staff reimbursement, this has been a major issue with a lot of the uh discretionary allocations to a lot of the small organizations.

Uh what is being done?

Uh, you know, my office, I think every council office acts as a medium between uh the DYCD and those organizations.

But there are many a times when DYCD should just directly call those organizations if they're issues that occur or documents are missing.

Uh, there's sometimes there's like a major lapse between communications between DYC and those organizations.

What we want to do is see how we can strengthen that with DYCD is directly, it's being more proactive and reaching out to those organizations.

Uh, trust me, my office, we can be dealing with a whole host of other issues uh instead of having to be this medium or this go-between between NYGEN and nonprofit.

So if we could improve that, and that would go a long way.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And I'm sure the commissioner will take that into consideration and add that to the million list of things to do.

Um, I I'm just gonna do a quick lightning round around some things uh because I know we do have to wrap very quickly.

My my first question is just around SYP.

Hey, Val, there you go.

Um, just thinking about as we prepare into the summer and go into the summer and thinking about the issue we had last summer with the debit cards and things like that.

I just want to get a clear understanding of how are we moving forward this summer to ensure that that doesn't take place again and ensuring that um you know young people are getting paid in a timely manner and and uh and then other things are happening succinctly I can assure you that the team at DYCD is doing everything within our control to prevent it from happening again.

And the short I mean, I can talk about this for a very long time because it's been our focus since the day it happened last year, but high level, we're doing everything from engaging young people in more and more financial literacy training.

Our providers have been convened at DYCD to make sure they're focused on educating their young people on the risks of participating in fraud, and we're working with the banks, the law department, DOI, uh, the the payroll processor, and all of those folks to understand what they're doing to prevent it from happening too.

Thank you so much.

I know we have been encompassed crazy, but I will call you so we can have a deeper briefing to go over uh how do we prevent and what does that look like moving forward?