When the mayor’s office — with a certain amount of pardonable fanfare — released a report on Monday claiming it could save the city’s taxpayers $500 million using belt-tightening measures over the next four years, the No. 1 biggest item, at an estimated $100 million, was, to steal a phrase from the Gambino family, to pursue “enhanced enforcement against delinquent debtors.”

Leaving one to wonder: Who, exactly, owes the city one-tenth of a billion dollars?

Officials at the Department of Finance, which oversees such matters, were unable, on short notice, to provide a list of every single debt owed to New York City (say, for instance, that recidivist parking meter scofflaw in the Bronx in hock to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars), but the mayor’s office provided a basic explanation of how it derived the $100 million figure.

It turns out that (surprisingly? unsurprisingly?) the most egregious deadbeats in New York are property owners. According to a spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, city officials should be able to recover in the next three years almost $40 million in unpaid property taxes.

An additional $30 million, the spokesman said, could be recouped from fines that had gone unpaid by any number of bothersome city offenders. These could include businesses that do not fix their sidewalks, real estate companies that fail to follow elevator safety laws, restaurants that disobey the health code, landlords with overly tolerant attitudes toward fire rules and those furtive folks who post illegal bills on our scaffolding.

The third biggest source of recoverable money, the mayor’s office found, is a civic chestnut: unpaid parking tickets. According to the spokesman, the opportunity presents itself to amass nearly $25 million from people with a flawed understanding of alternate-side parking.

Just by way of quick comparison, the report also suggested it was possible to claw back nearly $50 million by the end of 2014 by reducing the amount of office space the city uses by 1.2 million square feet (it now uses more than 19 million square feet), and to save a further $73 million by the end of 2013 by streamlining its human resources systems.

The report — titled “Maximizing Efficiency in NYC Government: A Plan to Consolidate and Modernize Back-Office Operations” — is a gold mine of nuggets that only a bureaucrat could love. It states, for instance, that the city maintains more than 150 fuel tanks filled with unleaded gasoline for its fleet of vehicles, and that nearly 8,000 of its office “work stations” go unused.

On one level, it is laudable that government has managed to produce a 41-page study, finding not merely some loose change missing from the city’s pockets but a sizable — and sorely needed — amount of lingering debt. But that, of course, raises a question, or maybe two questions. Did it really require nine years to figure out that $100 million was missing? And how, in fact, do officials plan to get it back?

The report tries to answer the second question — the “enforcement” part of enhanced enforcement — by recommending several measures.

It suggests simplifying the often byzantine process of contesting fines and tickets and advises, in a somewhat jargonized way, outsourcing receivables to well-capitalized commercial banks or other private vendors “to leverage emerging payment channels.”

Then, of course, there is the hardball tactic of siccing the professionals on deadbeats — a policy that the report suggests under the section heading “Implement More Strategic Use of Collection Agencies.” Credit bureaus, too, will get a workout, if the report’s advice is put in place. After all, the city already expects to squeeze $5 million over the next three years from debtors by threatening their FICO scores.

(Source: NY Times)