Rent examiners testified, and tenants and owners confirmed, that other procedures were widely used to improperly speed up processing. As was noted earlier, many cases are closed because responses made by tenants and owners never make it to their files. Rather than allow time to elapse so that mail can be found and added to the official case file, however, testimony indicated that examiners often close cases quickly under the pressure of meeting production quotas. We were given a quota. We have been stressed at meetings that production is all that matters.
Production is what counts.
Rent examiner Elliot Vizansky noted that during 1986 the division's due process procedures changed to increase production output. Before 1986, each contention made by a party in a case was sent to the opposing party for a response. That procedure was changed subsequently with owners' responses to tenants' complaints and tenants' responses to owners' answers no longer sent to opposing parties. Several tenants and owners testified that, upon examining their case files, they discovered they had never received contentions made by opposing parties in their cases and consequently had not provided DHCR with important evidence relevant to their cases. DHCR used in accepting affirmations from attorneys in lieu of leases or other evidence in cases.