Undercover ‘secret shopper’ program shows city agencies breaking language access laws

“This story was originally published by THE CITY. Read the original here.

Every summer, the New York City mayor’s office hires a small team of multilingual interns to go undercover into city service centers and pretend they do not speak English. 

The interns, “secret shoppers” who are assigned a character and a backstory, walk in with a simple question for the staff, often about a form or program eligibility. 

They assess sites from the Chinatown Medicaid Office to the Fort Greene Sexual Health Clinic to Bronx Family Court, and ask questions that range from “Can my uncle get a permit for a barbecue” to “Do I qualify for this health care program?” 

The secret shoppers, often five to 10 high school and college students on summer break, covertly canvas city agencies to evaluate how centers are meeting language accessibility standards. While waiting to be helped, the shoppers determine if interpretation services and translated documents are available. 

For the first time since the program launched in 2010, last month the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs released data on how various agencies have performed in the undercover trials. The data outlines the evaluations of 148 service centers across the city as gathered by secret shoppers in 2023.

Over half of service centers were in some violation of New York City’s language access law, Local Law 30, in 2023, the new data shows. 

The secret shopper program originally developed in response to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2008 executive order mandating all city agencies translate documents and provide interpretation. In 2017, when Local Law 30 was passed to raise the standards of language accessibility, the program adjusted their undercover assessments to match. 

Nearly 40% of the centers did not have translated materials at all in 2023, even though they are required to have translated documents in the city’s 10 most common non-English languages (Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Bangla, Haitian-Creole, Korean, Arabic, Urdu, French and Polish).  

The shopper data only assessed sites for Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. Still, a quarter of the centers did not provide oral translation services at all, another legal requirement.

With nearly half of all New Yorkers speaking a language other than English at home, and the population of migrants and asylum seekers growing, advocates say that the agencies are failing to meet the needs of the moment. 

“This is just against the law. I'm glad that the data is public now to illustrate the magnitude of the problem,” said Amaha Kassa, executive director of African Communities Together and an advocate for increased language access. “We need to be doing better by immigrant New Yorkers.”

‘A Lack of Will’

The Office of Immigrant Affairs said they finally made the data public after being advised to by their general counsel earlier this year.

Francisco Navarro, a senior policy advisor with the Mayor's Office of Operations, has run the secret shopper program since it began 14 years ago and believes it has had an impact. 

“The program has led to internal enhancements that have made it easier for New Yorkers to take advantage of city resources, regardless of the language they speak,” Navarro wrote in an email to THE CITY.

When a secret shopper notes that an agency service center does not meet a requirement, the feedback is given back to the agencies themselves — who are responsible for their own language accessibility compliance. 

The mayor’s office itself, despite collecting the secret shopper data, does not have regulatory or enforcement power over the agencies. Local Law 30 mandates that each agency create its own language access plan in order to meet the legislation’s requirements. 

“There seems to be just a lack of will for agencies to actually provide the resources that they need to be providing,” said Taina Wagnac, senior manager of state and local policy at the New York Immigration Coalition. The Coalition helped push for Local Law 30 in 2017 and has advocated to make sure agencies meet those standards since. In Wagnac’s experience, even when documents are translated, she said, the translations are often riddled with errors and include phrases in English. 

For André Zhang Sonera, who was a secret shopper in 2015, participating in the program began a career of language access policy. When he moved to New York from Puerto Rico in 2012, his mother spoke Spanish and his father spoke Chinese. 

His experience interpreting for his parents motivated him to be a secret shopper in college. “It’s a burden that falls on a kid to translate vital information to their parents,” Zhang Sonera told THE CITY. 

He said he was shocked that even city employees would say, “‘You are in America, speak English,’” to him as a secret shopper, so he made language access policy a priority when he began a career working for state officials in Indiana. 

The city Comptroller’s Office has audited city agencies for compliance with Local Law 30 since the law began in 2017. In nearly all the reports, based on document evaluation and site visits, the audit determined that agencies were “generally compliant.” 

When the comptroller found an agency “not fully compliant with certain aspects of Local Law 30,” the most common reason was a lack of documents translated to the top 10 designated citywide languages. 

“Local Law 30 provides an important framework to ensure that all New Yorkers have access to and understand the services New York City agencies provide," Comptroller Brad Lander told THE CITY. "Through audits, constituent surveys, and our own internal translation work, my office is committed to helping all agencies achieve more expansive and comprehensive communications to our constituents who make up the unique, diverse fabric of New York.”

But at many of the agencies that were designated as generally compliant in the comptroller reports — such as the Human Resources Administration, which was audited in 2023 — the secret shoppers still found significant language access violations.

Of the quarter of secret shoppers that were not given an oral translation at all across city centers, over half indicated Google Translate was used. In certain centers, shoppers were simply told to “come back later” or “find a bilingual person in the waiting room.” 

When oral translation is provided, city agencies often rely on over-the-phone interpretation services, primarily a California company called LanguageLine Solutions. The new data shows only 19% percent of the secret shoppers were directed towards a service like LanguageLine. 

Wagnac and Kassa, alongside Councilmmbers Julie Won and Sandra Ung, both Queens Democrats, are working to create a community-based program that would provide in-person translator services to city agencies.

Their plan calls for the city to fund the start of the Language Justice Collaborative, a co-op interpreter bank to be made up of multilingual community members able to translate for non-English speakers. 

Legislation to start the Collaborative passed in December of 2022, and the program was granted $3.8 million of funding to begin development in 2023 — but it was then left out of the mayor’s fiscal year 2024 budget. Wagnac and Kassa have been working with Won to get the funds back into the final version of the 2025 budget, set to be finalized by the end of the month, so they can launch the program. 

“A language line is better than nothing,” Won said. “But we are doing a huge disservice to our city when we look at how many people need translation and how many we are serving.” 

A Healthy Tongue

The centers visited by secret shoppers include city health clinics and medical offices, where proper translation is of vital concern. Two thirds of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene sites visited by secret shoppers in 2023 did not comply with a language access law, according to the new data.

“Ask any immigrant kid who has to translate extremely sensitive health information for their parents,” said Kassa. “It’s the worst case scenario.”

The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the city’s Health and Hospitals agency both have public language access plans that affirm documents translated in the most commonly used languages are required to be available for all patients. But nonprofit groups began to call attention to the lack of compliance with translation requirements in 2021, as THE CITY reported, with little response from the DOHMH. 

Health centers and hospitals are required to provide free oral interpretation. For many non-English speaking New Yorkers visiting hospitals, that means a call to the language access line.  

Zoria Suliatytska, who moved to the city two years ago from Ukraine after Russian forces invaded her country, explained that the language line was a relief when she visited a hospital recently. 

“I was worried about how I would explain what was bothering me,” Suliatytska said. But when she connected to the language line from an iPad at the hospital, she said it worked well for her.

When translated documents are not available, which was the case for nearly half of the health sites visited by secret shoppers, the burden often falls on family members and friends.  

“When we see family members getting asked to translate critical health documents, it is often a big burden for people who might misunderstand or misrepresent the information,” Kassa said. “It can even be traumatic for kids to be responsible kids to translate what happened to their parents, such as medical documentation for an asylum case.”

In a key April City Council meeting, hundreds of African migrants rallied for more language access support, with specific requests for improvement in health care settings. THE CITY reported that in many shelters, the translation line does not work for those who speak indigenous languages, and the burden often falls on volunteers and advocates able to translate. 

Advocates expressed frustration that the city’s Health and Hospital’s agency did not attend the meeting, and Council members advocated for better data on the experience of migrants in city service centers. 

“Healthcare professionals generally do not provide documents in Haitian Creole,” Sandra Judene, supervising attorney at Catholic Charities, said in the meeting. “We have frequently seen cases where Haitians were provided medical information and records written only in English and Spanish.”

“Why don't you have an interpreter in the hospital?” said Corrinne Ombongo-Golden, a tenant organizer from the Congo living in the Bronx, in the meeting. “Why do I have to go and translate for my brother and sister every time they have an emergency?”

Meanwhile, the State Comptroller’s Office began an audit of the city’s Health and Hospitals agency language access services in January, according to a report from the agency's external audit meeting in May. The office could not confirm a timeline for the audit’s completion. 

Kassa, of African Communities Together, believes health care interpretation and translation should be a priority for City Hall. 

“People need to be able to talk confidently with their doctors,” he said. “This is where our language access plans are letting us down.”

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