Welfare Agency Is Sued Over Translation Services
An advocacy group sued New York City’s welfare agency on Tuesday, seeking to force it to comply with laws and policies that require translation and interpretation services for its clients.
A 2003 city law, the Equal Access to Human Services Act, which was passed after being resisted by the Bloomberg administration, gave city agencies five years to phase in comprehensive translation services, supplied by phone or in person. In addition, it required that city forms be made available in Arabic, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Korean, Russian and Spanish. The deadline was February 2009.
The advocacy group, Legal Services NYC, filed the lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on behalf of six clients. Because of language barriers, the suit contends, they lost benefits, their benefits were delayed, or they were unable to appeal benefits determinations effectively.
In 2006, the city’s Human Resources Administration, which handles food stamp and welfare benefits, submitted a plan listing the processes it would adopt, including phone interpretation services, document translation priorities and cards that people could use to identify which of 21 languages they spoke.
In addition, the city negotiated a contract with Language Line, a phone interpretation service that assists pharmacies and the Police Department.
“On paper, it looks really strong,” said Amy Taylor, who coordinates the language access project at Legal Services NYC, which examines city agencies for compliance with the law. But she said her group’s surveys found that the translated forms and documents were rarely available at the Human Resources Administration. “In implementation, it’s really lacking,” she said.
The six plaintiffs named in the lawsuit speak Spanish, Mandarin or Cantonese Chinese, and Soninke, a West African language.
John C. Liu, a Democratic city councilman from Queens and immigrant from Taiwan who was a sponsor of the 2003 bill, said at the news conference announcing the lawsuit, “New York City, the international capital of the world, should not discriminate against New Yorkers who do not speak English well.”
The commissioner of the Human Resources Administration, Robert Doar, issued a statement in response to the suit, saying his agency “provides between 7,000 and 8,000 interpretation services each year through our contracted services.” It also provides interpretation services by hundreds of bilingual staff workers, and other community resources. The agency has also translated 800 client-contact forms, brochures and notices into the six required languages, he said.
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