A former chief information officer for New York City's Independent Budget Office has been indicted after prosecutors say he snuck back into his old Manhattan office a week after being fired and downloaded more than 4,000 sensitive files onto a USB drive he then took home to Queens.
Monserate Fernandez, who served as IBO's chief information officer until January 2025, is charged with third-degree burglary, unauthorized use of a computer, and fifth-degree criminal possession of stolen property, according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who posted about the case on X this week. “We allege the former head of IT for the Independent Budget Office downloaded thousands of files to a USB drive that he took home,” Bragg wrote, pointing readers to further reporting from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. Bragg and Department of Investigation Commissioner Nadia Shihata jointly announced the charges on August 13.
IBO terminated Fernandez on January 17, 2025, deactivating his employee account and remote access the same day, per the DA's office. The agency also changed the locks to its server room and rear office entrance and told Fernandez he was no longer authorized to access its physical or virtual resources. But investigators say those precautions weren't enough.
An After-Hours Return to the Office
According to court filings cited in the DA's announcement, Fernandez allegedly entered the IBO office at approximately 8 p.m. on January 24, 2025 — one week after his termination — and used a local administrator account to bypass the system revocations, logging into two physical computers that hadn't been fully locked down. Prosecutors allege he then copied more than 4,000 files from IBO's server onto a USB storage device.
That device was later recovered from Fernandez's Queens home, prosecutors said, seized pursuant to a court-authorized search warrant. “IT professionals working for city agencies are charged with safeguarding the city's sensitive information and files,” Bragg said in the announcement. Shihata was more pointed, saying Fernandez “allegedly abused his position by unlawfully entering an unauthorized building and downloading more than 4,000 sensitive data files,” and describing the allegations as “a serious breach of trust and an improper taking of confidential government information.”
How the Breach Was Discovered
The misconduct was first detected internally by IBO staff, who reported the security breach to the city's Department of Investigation, the independent watchdog agency tasked with probing municipal corruption and employee misconduct. IBO itself is a nonpartisan agency created under the 1989 New York City Charter revision specifically to give the city independent budget analysis free from mayoral or executive interference, which is part of why the sensitivity of its internal files matters.
Fernandez's job was eliminated as part of a broader technology consolidation. Mayor Eric Adams created the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation in January 2022 under Executive Order 3 to fold scattered municipal tech operations into a single citywide authority. That reorganization led directly to IBO transferring its IT maintenance functions to OTI in January 2025 — the same month Fernandez's CIO post was eliminated.
Part of a Wider Public-Integrity Push
The case adds to a string of recent joint prosecutions between the Manhattan DA's office and DOI targeting city workers accused of abusing their positions. Earlier this month, the two agencies announced the indictment of a 24-year-old shelter housing specialist accused of stealing thousands from homeless residents seeking housing vouchers. In March, the same office announced charges against a former city Department of Buildings supervisor accused of taking more than $75,000 in cash and travel bribes to fast-track building approvals for over 300 projects.
The Manhattan DA's office maintains specialized public-integrity teams that regularly partner with city investigative bodies like DOI to pursue white-collar crime and unauthorized breaches of municipal assets. Third-degree burglary, the lead felony count against Fernandez, is a Class D non-violent felony under New York law carrying a maximum sentence of up to seven years in state prison. The two misdemeanor counts — unauthorized use of a computer and fifth-degree criminal possession of stolen property — each carry a maximum of up to one year in jail.
It remains unclear exactly what the more than 4,000 files contained or whether any of the data was shared or monetized before investigators executed the search warrant at Fernandez's home. It's also unclear whether city agencies have since moved to purge legacy local administrator accounts on office hardware following OTI's centralized takeover of IT operations.
