NYC's MyCity app: $100M spent, $80.9M more requested

In January 2022, Mayor Adams created the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI)⧉ to consolidate the city's technology operations, and announced that OTI would build MyCity: a 'one-stop shop' so residents would not have to visit separate agency websites to apply for benefits, business licenses, or jobs services.▸ Nearly four years and more than $100 million later⧉, a New York City Comptroller audit found the one-stop shop mostly isn't one: of MyCity's five workstreams, only the childcare portal digitizes an existing process end to end. Benefits, jobs, and much of business services largely redirect users to pre-existing city websites rebranded as MyCity applications. OTI has asked for $80.9 million more in the 2026 budget, disagreed with all seven of the audit's recommendations, and told auditors MyCity was never meant to do the real-time agency-performance tracking its own website promises.

The audit's own account of the problem is concrete: applying for city benefits typically means completing multiple separate applications with duplicate documentation, and sometimes appearing in person for interviews during the workweek -- which can cause applicants to miss work and lose pay⧉.▸ MyCity was meant to let residents share their data once, get proactive benefit recommendations, and receive services through a digital wallet. As of October 2025, OTI had spent more than $100 million through more than 120 agreements⧉ with roughly 50 different vendors, and its January 2026 budget plan called for $74.3 million more in capital funding plus $6.6 million to convert 16 consultant positions into 24 in-house staff roles -- a combined $80.9 million, rounded to $81 million elsewhere in the same report.

OTI paid $2.5 million⧉ to vendor Innovative Business Concepts for MyCity portal design services, but could not produce the roadmap document, detailed project plans, or cost estimates those contracts required -- documentation auditors requested repeatedly over many months.▸ The audit found the Benefits workstream simply redirects users to the existing ACCESS NYC site with no functional changes, the Jobs workstream initially just rebranded the existing Jobs NYC website, and the Business Services workstream mainly redirects users to other city agency sites to complete transactions.

Only Childcare -- letting families apply for ACS vouchers and DOE-contracted care online instead of on paper -- was built out end to end.▸ Even there, the system runs about half empty: 140,760 applications had been submitted since launch as of October 2025, and 65,369 of them (46%) were deemed ineligible⧉, a rate the audit attributes partly to MyCity's lack of basic eligibility checks for household income and children's ages.

OTI's own Citywide Policy for Performance Testing of Public-Facing Applications⧉ requires an average page-response time under three seconds and a 90th-percentile response time under five seconds before deployment.▸ Independent Google Lighthouse scans found the childcare-voucher site scoring 7 out of 100 on mobile and 9 out of 100 on desktop -- and the DOE-contracted-care site scoring just 4 out of 100 on mobile -- on a scale where 90 to 100 is good performance. OTI's own tests separately showed the portal's 'ChatNow' feature took more than 24 seconds to load and the chatbot's 90th-percentile response times ran 12.4 to 16.2 seconds, both well outside the standard the agency wrote for itself. OTI told auditors it would finish analyzing the problems by December 31, 2025, with remediation expected by June 30, 2026.

MyCity's AI chatbot, launched in September 2023 to answer business owners' questions and expanded in March 2025 to cover general city services, was tested two ways.▸ Auditors found that of more than 2,200 questions asked in July and August 2025, only 70 users left a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating -- and 50 of those 70 (71.4%) were negative⧉. OTI's formal written response countered that the chatbot 'consistently provides over 95% accuracy' and that negative feedback 'hovers around 2.25% of all responses' -- a rate the audit says OTI reached by dividing negative ratings into the total count of user prompts rather than into the 70 users who actually rated a response.

Auditors measured the inconsistency against the National Institute of Standards and Technology's AI Risk Management Framework⧉, which calls for AI systems to be reliable and consistent -- and found the chatbot gave different answers to the same question asked twice, with responses affected by whether a user capitalized 'NYC' or phrased a question a particular way.

OTI disagreed with all seven of the audit's recommendations, including the one asking the agency to conduct a comprehensive feasibility review and decide whether to continue, scale back, or end MyCity.▸ It did not, however, reject the idea outright: OTI's written response said it "welcomes the opportunity for a level-setting MyCity program review that would examine alignment with new administration priorities"⧉. OTI's own counter-numbers, also in that response, describe a different picture: more than 150,000 childcare applications and recertifications submitted, about 81% of childcare-benefit applications now processed through MyCity, and a 4.3-out-of-5 user-satisfaction rating on that one portal. The Comptroller's office will track whether OTI acts on any of the seven recommendations through its public Audit Recommendations Tracker, updated periodically.