City Ordered to Provide Back Pay in F.D.N.Y. Bias Case New York City must pay as much as $128 million in back wages to minority candidates who took the Fire Department's screening test but were never hired, according to a ruling by the federal judge who had deemed the test discriminatory. Thousands of minority applicants could split the pot, which is intended to "recreate the conditions and relationships that would have been had there been no unlawful discrimination," according to the court order. The ruling came after more than four years of litigation in which the city and the Fire Department stood accused by the Justice Department and, later, the Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black firefighters, of using screening exams that had a disparate impact on black and Hispanic candidates for entry-level firefighter positions. The Fire Department has remained almost 97 percent white for decades. In calculating the amount of back pay owed to minority applicants who were not hired, the presiding judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, relied heavily on the analyses of the Justice Department's expert witness, Bernard R. Siskin. Dr. Siskin estimated the number of applicants who would have become firefighters if black and Hispanic applicants had passed the entrance exam at the same rates as whites and calculated the wages they would have earned. The net amount of back pay will be subject to reductions for the actual earnings of each plaintiff during the period. Every minority applicant who took the department's screening test in 1999 or 2002 and was not selected should receive notice that they could be eligible to receive payments as a part of the class. Those applicants will then have to prove in hearings how much they actually earned during the period they could have been firefighters. Each applicant will then earn a proportion of the difference between the total earnings of the class and the $128 million. The Justice Department estimates that 2,200 applicants will be eligible for monetary relief under the criteria the court has adopted, according to the judge's order. Capt. Paul Washington, former president of the Vulcan Society, said in a statement: "The Vulcan Society has been fighting for almost 75 years to open the doors of the Fire Department to black firefighters. This is a great victory for those who have been excluded from serving our city because of their race. Michael A. Cardozo, the city's corporation counsel, disputed the judge's findings. "We believe the court's latest opinion is erroneous, and, in any event, is the first step in a lengthy process," Mr. Cardozo said in a statement. As the court itself noted, any damages the city ultimately must pay will be reduced by the amount each member of the class earned. When all the proceedings have been completed, the damages, if any, that the city will have to pay will be far less than $128 million.