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The New York City Housing Authority, known as Nycha, spent almost $4 million to replace eight roofs at a Staten Island housing project — 10 years before the expiration of their warranty, which would have covered repairs for free.

That, at least, is according to a 62-page audit released on Friday by the city’s comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, whose office found the city has wasted millions on roof repairs that should have been free, and systematically failed to conduct maintenance to prevent leaks, mold and mildew.

“At a time when every penny counts, Nycha is essentially lighting money on fire by investing millions in roof repairs when it doesn’t have to,” Mr. Stringer said during a news conference at the Ingersoll Houses in Brooklyn.

Nycha, the largest public housing system in the country, is under strict oversight after a federal lawsuit accused the agency of cover-ups, chronic mismanagement and squalid living conditions, including pervasive mold and exposed lead paint.

Earlier this week, Bart M. Schwartz, the independent monitor who oversees the housing authority, also issued a damning report that shed light on the agency’s flawed inner-workings, culture of dysfunction and lack of accountability.

Mr. Schwartz, who was appointed in late February, found Nycha fails to adequately clean up lead paint, uses imprecise internal data and is not adequately staffed to deal with a pest infestation so bad that rats are known to clamber up clogged garbage chutes to 14th-floor apartments.

Taken together, the reports offer a bleak picture of housing conditions for 400,000 low-income residents and the daunting road ahead for the agency’s new chairman, Gregory Russ, who will assume his role in August.

Here are some of the findings:

Lack of maintenance and millions wasted on roofs

Leaky roofs are a well-documented and seemingly intractable problem at the housing authority’s 325 developments. Because leaks can lead to mold, a severe health hazard, the city recently allocated more than $1 billion to replace hundreds of roofs.

The housing agency typically hires contractors to install roofs, which generally have a warranty of 20 years, during which time a private vendor can cover most repairs for free.

But the comptroller’s audit found the agency almost never uses its roof warranty coverage to make fixes, instead spending taxpayer money on repairs. The audit examined 700 roof-related work orders over a decade and found Nycha used its warranty coverage only nine times.

A lack of maintenance can void warranties, burdening Nycha with the cost of repairs, but the agency has failed to adequately perform such maintenance. The comptroller’s office inspected 35 roofs in 13 developments and found deficiencies — from cracks to pools of water — in 88 percent of them.

Nycha has also failed to keep track of basic roof-related records — like copies of warranties and monthly inspection reports — and workers are rarely trained to ensure warranty standards are met.

As a result, the auditors found 19 damaged roofs that could cost $24.6 million in public funds to repair.

Chester Soria, a spokesman for the agency, said in a statement that the comptroller’s audit and recommendations were consistent with what Nycha “has been aware of and addressing through new systems we are already implementing.”

“In our July 17 response, Nycha agreed with many of his proposals, such as with our roof inspection and quality assurance process, and our record-keeping enhancements were underway before today’s report,” Mr. Soria said.

Rat infestations

In his first quarterly report released on Monday, Mr. Schwartz, the monitor, found that Nycha was unlikely to meet deadlines to reduce its rat population and backlog of pest complaints.

Nycha employs only 108 pest exterminators, which means each exterminator is responsible for about 1,400 apartments.

Twelve more exterminators were expected to be hired, but the report said Nycha needed almost 1,000 exterminators to meet the Aug. 1 deadline stipulated in the agreement struck by Mayor Bill de Blasio and the federal government to address pest complaints.

Mr. Schwartz was particularly struck by the rat epidemic at the Washington Houses in Harlem.

In a letter to Nycha, the tenant association described residents feeling like “hostages in our own homes at night” because of rats spilling out of elevators and stairways, and workers refusing to enter compactor rooms “for fear of being attacked by rats.” Rats began to climb up the stuffed garbage chutes.

The letter went ignored by Nycha, the 81-page report said, until the monitor’s team pressured the agency into addressing the problem.

Lead paint

For years, the housing authority lied about its failure to conduct lead paint inspections, which put thousands of young children at risk and led federal prosecutors to investigate the agency.

Those cover-ups forced the city to agree to the appointment of Mr. Schwartz to ensure the agency complied with lead regulations. But Mr. Schwartz said the city lacked a comprehensive strategy to address lead paint, and Nycha has conceded it is not in compliance with lead paint rules.

For example, the agency does not have a count of how many children under age 6, the population most vulnerable to lead paint, live or frequently visit Nycha apartments, the report found. Many lead paint cleanups are being conducted inadequately, the report said, and the agency is waiting on hundreds of laboratory results of lead paint tests.

“These first few months of our work have revealed Nycha as an organization fraught with serious problems in structure, culture and direction and perhaps even worse,” Mr. Schwartz wrote. “No one needs a monitor to be appointed to figure that out.”

This year, 18 cases of young children with elevated levels of lead in their blood have been reported to the federal government by Nycha.

‘Putrid liquid’ and lack of accountability

On an unannounced visit to the Polo Grounds Towers in Upper Manhattan, the monitor’s team discovered a large pipe “cascading putrid liquid” from the ceiling into a laundry room. A worker, who was trying to stem the flow with a mop, said the problem had persisted for two months.

That was because a superintendent had decided scaffolding was necessary to repair the pipe; workers were waiting for an order of wood, a carpenter and then a plumber to fix the issue. Then a secretary inexplicably closed out the work order for the leak.

After the monitor’s team told the agency about the leak, it was repaired in three hours with only a plumber and a ladder.

That example, Mr. Schwartz wrote, was emblematic of an inefficient bureaucracy with little accountability and oversight.

“The main problem here is Nycha’s failure to take action to solve a problem that needed immediate attention,” he wrote. “Nycha must learn how to identify and fix these problems expeditiously without getting bogged down in layers of bureaucracy or a ‘check the box’ mentality.”

Luis Ferré-Sadurní writes about housing in New York City for the Metro Desk. He joined The Times in 2017 and is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. @luisferre

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