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Scofflaw city workers are getting pinched where it hurts — their paychecks.
City Hall is hunting down municipal employees who aren’t paying their parking tickets — 4,600 deadbeats with 12,000 outstanding tickets worth a total of $1.6 million — in one of the biggest crackdowns in years, The Post has learned.
The city Finance Department intends in the next few months to garnishee the wages of evasive employees who have failed to heed the recent warnings they received from their own commissioners to pay up.
In the last sweep, in 2002, the city went after the paychecks of only 750 employees.
“No one likes fines. But people who don’t pay the city are hurting the vast majority of New Yorkers who do,” Finance Commissioner David Frankel told The Post yesterday.
After agency heads fired off warning memos in December, the city recovered $600,000 in outstanding fines from 2,600 workers who paid 5,600 tickets, according to agency data.
But 4,600 delinquents — representing every city agency and averaging $350 in individual ticket debt — remain.
CityScoff, a program designed to flag city workers in the red on back judgments, will send up to three letters to employees warning them that their wages can be seized and bank accounts frozen if they don’t cough up the dough.
Finance officials would not break down the number of scofflaws by city agency. But Fire Department employees were told in an internal memo last week that “multiple FDNY employees” were in bad standing.
One retired FDNY employee admitted the Bravest, who often put union placards on their dashboards in an effort to shoo away NYPD traffic agents, routinely crumple up tickets they get when parked illegally.
“They brazenly flout the law,” he said. “They have a sense of entitlement.”
Officials first began cracking down on city-worker scofflaws in 1987, when CityScoff debuted.
But CityScoff suffered from glitches and was completely down between 2000 and 2002.
Facing massive budget shortfalls, the Finance Department reorganized its collections unit last December and ramped up pursuit of delinquent drivers. The agency is also sending more debts to collection agencies.
“We are going after all the tickets we can possibly collect on,” Frankel said.
The city was owed $440 million in outstanding parking debt from all drivers as of last November.
By the numbers
City workers with unpaid parking tickets in December: 7,200
Tickets: 17,600
Amount owed: $2.2M
Employees who have since paid: 2,600
Amount they paid: $600,000
Workers who still owe: 4,600
Tickets still owed: 12,000
Amount still owed: $1.6M
Average amount owed: $350
Source: City Department of Finance
Additional reporting by Ginger Adams Otis