The battle between the Mamdani administration and the City Council to balance the budget has been contentious for one fundamental reason: costs continue to rise faster than revenue, and no one wants to raise taxes or cut programs until all alternatives have been exhausted.
The short-term spending cuts proposed to date are simply not enough to balance the budget anymore — not even with a one-time cash infusion from Albany. The hard truth is that the city must address the underlying forces that are driving costs up while also finding new sources of revenue.
One long overdue option is to take concrete steps to reduce the epidemic of auto insurance fraud, which effectively serves as a structural tax on mobility for many of the city’s residents.
In New York, staged auto accidents, medical mills, and a lax threshold for awarding payouts are siphoning money from drivers, municipalities, and the MTA alike. The governor has rightly made reining in this out-of-control enterprise a top priority in the state budget talks, taking on one of Albany’s most entrenched special interests — the trial lawyers — with the goal of lowering insurance costs for New Yorkers.
The numbers are staggering. Fraud costs exceed $20 billion nationally in organized automobile crashes. In New York, the number of motor vehicle accidents later determined to have been staged for insurance fraud purposes increased 80% between 2020 and 2025, making it one of the nation’s highest incident states.
Data from the state Department of Financial Services suggest that auto insurance fraud is inflating premiums by nearly 8%, or a difference of more than $300.
New York’s no-fault system, created to speed relief for the genuine victims of auto accidents, has instead made the state a breeding ground for abuse. The law requires insurers to pay qualifying medical claims promptly and without fault determinations. The speed at which the system adjudicates cases benefits deserving victims but also abets fraud. The result is higher premiums for drivers and higher taxes or deficits for cities and the MTA when their liability costs rise.
Data from the state comptroller’s office show municipalities statewide are under increasing fiscal strain, with insurance and liability costs a growing portion of their budgets. New York City bears a disproportionate share of that burden, as does the MTA, whose CEO, Janno Lieber, estimates that Hochul’s proposed reforms could save the authority some $50 million annually in crash-related litigation funds.
That money could be far better spent on much-needed improvements for the more than 6 million people who ride the New York City subways and buses every day. If New York fails to restrain the growth of insurance costs and litigation, any transit-related investment must compete with other priorities, and to keep the status quo it will take service cuts elsewhere or higher taxes.
There is irrefutable evidence that reining in out-of-control litigation costs by cracking down on fraud benefits taxpayers. One year after a wide-ranging tort reform bill was signed into law by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) reported that casualty and liability costs decreased by $2.8 million, dropping to $27 million.
Eliminating fraud should not be a partisan issue. If New York’s politicians want to offer residents the expanded services they have promised while still maintaining credibility with the populace, they must move to reduce a large and very preventable expense.
Brannon is a senior fellow with the Jack Kemp Foundation.