AI Regulation Tracker  /  Enforcement audit

State Audit Says NYC Barely Enforces Its AI Hiring Law: Why That Raises Employer Risk, Not Lowers It

The New York State Comptroller found NYC's enforcement of Local Law 144 cannot reliably catch non-compliance. That does not make the bias audit optional. It moves the enforcement risk to plaintiffs, the state AG, and discovery. Here is what HR should do.

By Anthony Guerriero  ·  Reviewed by The Leveraged Years Editorial Desk  ·  Published June 27, 2026  ·  Last updated June 27, 2026

The law is old news. The audit is the news.

New York City's Local Law 144 has been on the books for years and enforceable since July 2023. It requires an employer using an automated employment decision tool to commission an independent bias audit, publish a summary of the results, and give candidates advance notice that such a tool is being used. For many HR teams the law settled into the background, in part because the city rarely seemed to act on it. On December 2, 2025, the New York State Comptroller put a number on that quiet, and the number changes the calculation.

The Comptroller's audit, identified as 2024-N-6, concluded that the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the agency that enforces Local Law 144, runs an enforcement program that cannot reliably tell who is breaking the law. The instinct on reading that is relief. The correct reaction is the opposite.

What the auditors actually found

The findings are specific and they are unflattering. The audit reviewed how DCWP handles complaints and how it checks compliance, and both came up short. On complaint intake, the report states that "DCWP's AEDT complaint process is ineffective in ensuring that all complaints related to non-compliance with LL144 are routed to DCWP" (2024-N-6, December 2, 2025). The auditors also noted that "despite receiving only two AEDT complaints during the audit's scope, DCWP did not investigate whether the complaint intake process worked." In other words, the front door for reporting a violation is unreliable, and the city had not tested whether it opens.

On proactive review, the gap is starker, and here the audit puts numbers on the page. The auditors found that DCWP identified "just a single issue of non-compliance," while the Comptroller's own review found "at least 17 instances of potential non-compliance under LL144" (2024-N-6, December 2, 2025). One agency count of one, against an independent count of at least seventeen. The audit's conclusion follows plainly: the report found that the agency's approach "will not address the difficulty in identifying non-compliance," noting that "additional educational outreach has not been performed" since the initial stakeholder education. DCWP, for its part, agreed to adopt most of the Comptroller's recommendations, which means tighter enforcement is the direction of travel, not the status quo.

Why weak enforcement raises your risk

It is tempting to read one flagged issue against seventeen the auditors found as breathing room. That misreads where employment risk in New York actually lives. Local Law 144 created a clear, public, documented standard of conduct. A state audit has now established, on the record, that the standard is widely ignored and that the city is not catching it. That record does not protect employers. It hands a roadmap to everyone else who can enforce.

Start with private litigation. A candidate who believes an automated tool screened them out can point to a public state audit confirming that non-compliance is common and undetected, which is exactly the backdrop a plaintiff's lawyer wants before a discrimination or disclosure claim. Add the New York Attorney General, whose office can pursue conduct the city missed. Add ordinary discovery, where a missing bias audit or a candidate who was never notified becomes a clean, dated fact that a jury understands. And add reputation, because an audit naming a hiring law that companies skip is the kind of story that travels. The city looking away does nothing to soften any of those.

The three obligations that are still mandatory

Nothing in the audit relaxes Local Law 144. The three core duties stand exactly as before. First, obtain an independent bias audit of each automated employment decision tool within the year before you use it, run by an auditor who is not the vendor. Second, publish a summary of the most recent audit results, including the date and the data, where candidates can find it, typically the careers section of your site. Third, notify candidates and employees at least ten business days before the tool is used and tell them they can request an alternative process or accommodation.

These are the facts a plaintiff, the AG, or a reporter will check first, because they are binary and easy to verify from the outside. Either the audit summary is posted with a current date or it is not. Either the notice went out or it did not. The audit's value to HR is that it tells you precisely which boxes outsiders will inspect.

What people-ops should do this quarter

Treat the audit as a deadline, not a reprieve. Inventory every automated tool in your NYC hiring and promotion stack, including resume screeners, assessment scorers, and ranking features inside your applicant tracking system, because vendors do not always flag which features fall under the law. For each one, confirm a bias audit completed within the last year, confirm the summary is posted and dated, and confirm the candidate notice is firing in the workflow. Keep dated proof of all three in one place, because the entire point of this audit is that the gap between policy and practice is now what gets examined. Good faith only counts when you can show it.

Browse the full AI Regulation News tracker

Informational analysis for working professionals, not legal advice. Confirm how any rule applies to your situation with qualified counsel.