Jocelyn E. Strauber

DOI Commissioner

Jocelyn Strauber was nominated to be DOI Commissioner in January 2022 and confirmed by the New York City Council in February 2022, taking office the same month. Commissioner Strauber has overseen an array of criminal investigations at DOI that have exposed bribery and kickback schemes involving City employees and those who do business with the City, fraud involving City programs, misconduct by construction contractors, and contraband smuggling by Department of Correction staff, among others. Providing transparency with respect to DOI’s work and the agency’s policy and procedural recommendations through public reports is a key priority for Commissioner Strauber and under her leadership DOI has issued more than 20 reports on a variety of complex issues of critical importance to the City, including fire safety and prevention in public housing, the accuracy of published data concerning the City’s intake facility for families seeking shelter, NYCHA’s handling of false positive tests for arsenic in the water in public housing, the NYPD's criminal group database, the negative impacts of police officer overtime, flaws in the City Board of Election’s contracting practices, and compliance risks involving City-funded homeless shelter providers.

Commissioner Strauber’s legal career spans the public and private sectors. Most recently, as a Partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, she has represented individuals and institutions in civil and criminal enforcement actions involving suspected civil and criminal fraud and corruption offenses, including Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, mail and wire fraud, securities fraud and accounting fraud, as well as in corporate governance matters. Prior to joining Skadden, from 2005 to 2013, she was a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where she handled cases from investigation through trial and on appeal, across a wide variety of areas, from illegal gun possession to fraud to large-scale international narcotics trafficking. She was named Deputy Chief and then Co-Chief of the Terrorism & International Narcotics Unit; in those roles she supervised the successful prosecution of several high-profile terrorism and national security cases, including Faisal Shahzad (who attempted to bomb Times Square in May 2010). In 2011, she was the recipient of the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award.

Earlier in her career, Commissioner Strauber clerked for the late William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States. She also served as a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice and clerked for the Hon. A. Raymond Randolph in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Commissioner Strauber graduated with a B.A. from Brown University, magna cum laude, and received her J.D. with high honors from Duke University School of Law, where she served as managing editor of the Duke Law Journal.