Blogger Identifies '$800 Million Typo' in New York City Budget

New York City, NY — For a few hours on Friday, it appeared that a blogger may have stumbled onto the NYPD's best kept, and most expensive, secret.

This year, New York uploaded new budgetary data sets into the city's Open Data Portal.

Doing so has allowed number crunchers like statistics professor Ben Wellington, who runs the blog I Quant New York, to search for previously hidden budgetary gems — like the fact that the NYPD will spend $791 million this year protecting foreign missions, fully 15 percent of its budget.

Or so it appeared.

Wellington detailed the discovery in a Friday blog post, though he remained skeptical, noting that in 2012, former NYPD head Ray Kelly said mission protection would cost just $27 million that year.

On Friday afternoon, a City Hall spokeswoman confirmed that the nearly $800 million sum was indeed a typo.

The NYPD will spend $25 million this year protecting foreign missions, she said. The much larger amount pays for the NYPD’s “Chief of Department” budget, which includes “a plethora of things, including overtime pay, longevity, shift differential and holiday pay.”

“We are working on fixing this misprint," the spokeswoman wrote.

On his blog, Wellington argued that the presumed error “makes the case for Open Data even stronger.”

“Our government officials are only human and our agencies have limited resources,” he wrote. “Budgets are far too large and complex to be understood end-to-end by our legislators. As more data gets out to the public, we’ll start to see that our citizens can help improve the way government operates — even if it’s sometimes proof reading!”

Top image courtesy of 401(K) 2012/Flickr

Editor's note: A previous version of the story misrepresented what data on the city's budget had historical been available.