Last year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was looking to one-up Mayor Bill de Blasio on the issue of homelessness. If doing that, the governor appointed one of mayor's rivals as an inspector of the system. So what has happened since? NY1 Political Reporter Courtney Gross has the exclusive details.

With great fanfare, City Comptroller Scott Stringer got an additional job responsibility last year.

"Comptroller Scott Stringer will review and inspect the New York City shelter system, and we thank him very much," Gov. Cuomo said in January 2016.

The governor said the city comptroller would be the new independent inspector of the city's shelter system, sniffing out and uncovering horrible conditions.

"They will do on-site inspections, and they will review operating and financial protocols," Cuomo said in his 2016 announcement.

That was put like this just a few days later:

"My job is to assess issues within the facilities, and then work with Commissioner [Steven] Banks and the administration to make things better," Stringer had said.

A year-and-a-half after those comments, those widespread, on-site inspections by Stringer have not occurred.

"Well, I am not the mayor, Courtney, I'm the comptroller," Stringer told me. "So if you want inspectors to go into the shelters as we proposed, you talk to the mayor. If you want auditors to monitor the shelter system, then you go to the comptroller, and that's exactly what we've done."

Stringer has examined the high cost of housing the homeless in hotels, and he uncovered dangerous conditions at shelters' child care centers.

But even then, the comptroller's team only did inspections at child care centers in 21 shelters; two of them were shut down. The city has more than 600 homeless shelters.

"You say inspect, or he says inspect — we audit. We go in and audit, that's what we do," Stringer said to me.

When NY1 asked the governor's office what Stringer did, they too said he was performing an auditing function. His work, they argue, assisted the Cuomo administration with shutting down more than 2,000 shelter units throughout the system.

During this same time period, the de Blasio administration ramped up its own inspections of city shelters, doing more than 7,300 so far this year.

Still, the problem is not solved.

As of the end of May, more than 15,000 violations were still open.