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The city’s top watchdog agency is so behind in conducting background checks for new city employees that it doesn’t expect to catch up for another three to four years, a top official said.

In preparation for a City Council hearing on the subject Monday, Department of Investigation Commissioner Margaret Garnett sent a memo last month to the Council’s financial analyst, Jack Stern, noting the backlog had dropped to 5,328 employees by the end of 2019 in part due to the agency hiring additional investigators.

That’s 15 percent fewer than last March when Garnett testified at a Council investigation’s committee hearing that the backlog had reached 6,300 – including 1,900 cases dating back to 2016 that were yet to be reviewed. The caseload briefly rose to a high of 6,480 last July.

However, Garnett also said in the memo dated Jan. 24, that even with an extra 13 investigators, DOI doesn’t expect to “close the backlog” for another “36-48 months.”

Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx), who chairs the investigations committee, said he appreciates the DOI’s “greater sense of urgency” in reducing its backlog but the “sheer size remains embarrassing.”

“The longer these background investigations languish, the less value those investigations become,” the councilman told The Post Sunday.

“What’s the value in conducting a background investigation three, four, five years after the hiring of an employee?”

He said failing to reduce the backlog leaves the city more vulnerable to hiring sexual pervs and other bad apples — even throughout the “upper levels of city government.”

For instance, DOI never got around to doing a full background check on David Hay, a former ex-deputy chief of staff at the Department of Education fired late last year after being arrested for allegedly trying to arrange sex with a 14-year-old boy in Wisconsin.

Torres called Hay’s hiring a “debacle,” adding that he plans to ask Garnett and other DOI staff at Monday’s investigations committee hearing how Hay fell through the cracks to work “at the highest level of DOE.”

Torres also said there are unanswered questions about Kevin O’Brien, a former top aide to Mayor Bill de Blasio.

O’Brien was hired in 2016, only months after being canned from a previous post at the Democratic Governors Association in Washington, DC, following allegations of committing sexual harassment.

He wound up being quietly sacked by the city in 2017 for allegedly sexually harassing two city staffers.

O’Brien had submitted DOI notarized background forms that failed to list the previous allegations before the city hired him, Garnett testified at the Council hearing last March.

DOI said that as of Sunday, it had decreased the backlog down to about 4,895 employees, adding that Garnett recognizes “the serious issue she inherited” when replacing former Commissioner Mark Peters in November 2018 and has taken “steps” to address it with the additional staffing.

The agency said its goal is to complete background investigations within six months

“Ultimately, hiring agencies, not DOI, make the decision regarding whether to wait for the outcome of a background investigation before allowing an employee to begin working,” DOI said.

Almost a quarter of new council workers who needed a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check started work without having one in place,  a Welsh Government audit has found.

The Wales Audit Office study of Conwy council ’s safeguarding of vulnerable people arrangements for 2018-2019 was discussed at the authority’s audit and governance scrutiny committee.

In total, 76.6% of new starters who needed the DBS check had one in place when they started work – according to the latest figures covered by the report. The target is 100%.

Auditors found Conwy council had “addressed the majority of the recommendations” from a 2015 study about safeguarding but found it “could improve” training arrangements.

Safeguarding training was completed by 48% of staff, and less than a third of staff in the authority’s education department had completed domestic violence awareness training by March 2019.

It also emerged the council was unaware how many school staff had completed safeguarding training because not all schools use the council’s computer system. Council officers want education staff to adopt its “robust” policies but cannot force them to said the report.

The audit office report said: “It is the responsibility of headteachers or the Designated Safeguarding Person in schools to keep a record of all staff who complete training and on what date, and they should be able to provide a list to the Council on request.”

The report went on to say the authority is considering transferring school staff records to its own system.

The council said it had responded to the proposals by “developing an action plan”.

Officers rejected a claim only 36 out of 62 schools had bothered to reply to a survey about how effective they were at giving safeguarding training to school governors. One officer claimed compliance had been “100%”.

However Wales Office auditor Gwilym Bury told members officers had been given a draft of the audit report and none of the figures were challenged.

The audit office study said it was the council’s “responsibility … to ensure they receive safeguarding training”.

Elsewhere the council was given a clean bill of health by auditors for its financial management and “effective use of resources”.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists suspended some activities last year after it realised it had not carried out background checks for more than 350 staff and patient representatives, reveals the HSJ.

HSJ understands the college had to put meetings of several of its committees on hold in September, while it carried out Disclosure and Barring Service checks on 374 people, including employees and patient and carer representatives.

Emails seen by HSJ show the college contacted its patient and carer representatives — often current or former mental health patients or carers it pays to help form policy and visit providers as part of accreditations — in October and November last year, asking them to fill in application forms for DBS checks.

The checks are ongoing but it is unclear how much of the college’s work remains suspended.

Some of the representatives had been working with the college for several years and been in contact with other vulnerable people at its committees or focus groups around the UK, HSJ has been told. 

The college confirmed to HSJ it was carrying out the outstanding background checks, but declined to say why they were missed, which staff groups were affected, and which activities had been suspended.

Robert Walker, who co-chaired the RCP’s now-disbanded “patients committee” for two years, told HSJ he did not have a DBS check in the five years he worked as a patient representative.

Mr Walker said: “As a vulnerable person I was amazed that a leading royal college or charity involved in mental health had not met the core principles of safeguarding.

“It’s a major issue because any vulnerable person with a physical or mental illness should be given appropriate safeguarding to protect them from psychological or physical abuse. The effect of them not applying checks is that it can put people at risk.”

The issue delayed the college’s plans to reform the role of its patient and carer representatives. These involve halving the number of representatives it uses from 300 to 150, but formally recruiting them as college employees and increasing their standard day rate from £100 to £140.

On 11 October, the college wrote to representatives to say that “in the light of updated guidance from the Charity Commission, we decided that only staff and patient and carer reviewers who have the minimum required DBS checks would be able to undertake college activity that brings them into contact with children and vulnerable adults”.

The email continued “administrative challenges… meant that we have been unable to carry out the checks as quickly as we would have liked”.

On 20 December, the college chief executive Paul Rees said in a further email that 120 of the 374 checks were completed, but the DBS checks meant the move to employed representatives was “unfortunately delayed”.

A Royal College of Psychiatrists spokeswoman said: “We are currently in the process of carrying [out] our DBS checks in line with recommendations with the Charity Commission for all our staff, patient and service user representatives and are due to conclude this work imminently.”

A Charity Commission spokeswoman said: “We previously engaged with the Royal College of Psychiatrists in May 2019 in relation to a safeguarding incident. The charity did the right thing when they reported the incident to the Commission and the trustees confirmed they were making a number of changes to their policies, including around DBS checks for patient and carer representatives, at the time. We followed-up with the charity on these changes, and based on the information provided to the Commission at the time, did not find further cause to engage. Should any further concerns come to light we would assess them.

 “More generally, protecting people from harm should be an absolute governance priority for all charities – this starts with having robust safeguarding policies in place and, crucially, ensuring they are followed.”