OATH / ECB judgment
unpaid city violation debt
An OATH/ECB judgment is what a New York City agency violation becomes once the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (which absorbed the old Environmental Control Board) rules against the respondent, or the respondent skips the hearing. At that point the fine stops being an allegation and becomes money legally owed to the city.
What it means in NYC
City agencies like DOB, Sanitation, and FDNY write the violations; OATH holds the hearings. When a judgment goes unpaid it stays on the record against the building and its owner, and the amounts stack up year after year. That makes it one of the cleanest distress signals in NYC real estate: not a prediction, just a ledger of what an owner was ordered to pay and did not.
The scale is larger than most people expect. Unpaid OATH/ECB judgments across New York City run $2,066,249,157 still collectible of a $3,426,173,824 gross ledger, spread over 382,614 buildings, all of it sitting in the public hearing record.
How DeedGraph uses it
DeedGraph totals the unpaid OATH/ECB judgments against each building and cites every line back to its hearing record. It is arithmetic on the city's own docket: no model, no score, just what the building owes.
Common questions
- Is an ECB judgment the same as an OATH judgment?
- Effectively yes. The Environmental Control Board was folded into OATH, so older records say ECB and newer ones say OATH. Both refer to a hearing outcome that ordered the respondent to pay the city.
- Does an unpaid judgment go away on its own?
- No. It stays on the record against the building and its owner until it is paid, settled, or vacated, and it keeps surfacing in diligence on the property in the meantime.