Hector Robertson first ran for City Council in 2021 because he was fed up with elected officials who were “allowing developers to come in and do whatever the hell they wanted to do.” He lost. Five years later, the city isn’t done with him. The Campaign Finance Board (CFB) is auditing records from a campaign whose staff largely dispersed and whose years-old documentation he’s piecing together day by day.

Robertson is one of more than a dozen candidates from the 2021 cycle who still have open audits, nearly a year after the 2025 cycle wrapped. The CFB completes most post-election audits within a year or two, but procedural delays and administrative backlogs have stretched a small number of those to more than five years after election day.

Earlier this year, a CFB audit of his 2021 campaign flagged a reimbursement he made from the matching funds to his personal account. Robertson said it was an advance made to the campaign for printing. The agency alleges he converted the matching funds for personal use, saying he has not provided enough documentation to show what the reimbursement was for. Now he has to prove the transaction was legitimate or pay a $3,421.84 fine. 

“You conduct an audit five months after the election, four months after the election, six months after the election—not six years after the election,” Robertson said. “That’s a recipe for disaster.” 

The 2021 election cycle saw record participation, with $126.9 million in public funds distributed to 308 qualifying candidates. The larger candidate field produced more audits.

Created in 1988, New York City’s matching funds program was set up to help grassroots challengers compete against well-funded opponents by multiplying small-dollar donations with taxpayer funds. 

For the CFB, detailed records are essential to ensure taxpayer funds are used within campaign finance guidelines. As Isaac Kaplan, an associate counsel for the CFB handling Robertson’s case, put it at an Oct. 8 agency meeting, “We need to see the exact expenditures, the exact amounts, because every dollar needs to be accounted for.”

Still, Robertson urged the board to consider the challenges posed by “the passage of time.” “Reconstructing individual transactions, personal advances, reimbursements, invoices, and campaign activities present practical difficulties,” he said. 

While he acknowledged every campaign’s recordkeeping responsibilities, he asked the board to “distinguish between an imperfect historical record and affirmative evidence that campaign funds were actually converted into personal use.” 

He also noted that the CFB assigned him three candidate service liaisons during his campaign. Robertson said this high turnover created communications delays and added confusion about the agency’s compliance rules. “Most of the information that I received from these liaisons was so different from each other,” he said.

According to Leo Glickman, an election attorney who frequently represents candidates at CFB hearings, audit delays disproportionately harm losing campaigns.

“When someone wins an election, everyone that you had in the campaign tends to hang around,” he said. “When you lose, everybody leaves.” 

Glickman said that campaign treasurers are almost always volunteers. Audit delays force them to “come back and spend a few weeks looking through receipts” years later, which, in his view, “just isn’t fair.”

Kyle Kennedy, legislative program manager for the government reform and watchdog group Reinvent Albany and a former candidate service liaison for the CFB, believes these backlogs are the inevitable consequence of a high volume of campaigns colliding with a rigorous oversight process. 

“Because there were so many matching funds participants, there’s the added complexity of the qualified expenditure analysis, which takes time,” he said.

For Kennedy, the delays also stem partly from the board’s “posture of flexibility towards candidates,” an approach he sees as a strength of the process. “They really want to work with folks, and so they provide a good number of extensions, and I think that can also draw out the timeline,” he said.

For Robertson, the cost of the delay is personal. He said he spent weeks reconstructing records from an election he lost five years ago — time he believes the CFB’s process made unavoidable. “It makes candidates — people — who are really well-intentioned not want to deal with the CFB because it’s an agency that’s not well run,” he said.