Attorney General Cuomo has raised red flags on possibly dozens of questionable pork-barrel discretionary grants that Albany lawmakers had sought to steer to community groups in their districts.

The attorney general’s office, which instituted a more rigorous review of the so-called member items with much fanfare more than a year ago, has put on hold an unknown number of taxpayer-funded grants because the recipients failed to show in contract agreements that the money would be used for legitimate public purposes.

A request by The New York Sun for a list of the frozen grants was declined by the attorney general’s office, which said it could not release the information because state lawyers have not completed a full inspection.

“It is still an ongoing process, which is why we can’t turn it over,” a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo said.

In addition to the denied grantees, hundreds of groups, many of which were appropriated money more than two years ago, have not received checks from the state because they have not submitted their grants for review by the attorney general’s office.

State officials say they cannot explain why such groups have, for the time being, decided to forgo the cash and declined to release their names.

Weeks after taking office last year, Mr. Cuomo announced a new vetting process for the grants, which total $200 million each year, with $170 million split between the Senate and the Assembly and the rest controlled by the governor.

The Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, and the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, historically control the largest portions of the Legislature’s share and divvy up the rest to lawmakers mostly on the basis of seniority.

Now, before money is disbursed, recipients are required to sign sworn certifications disclosing potential conflicts of interests with lawmakers and their staffs, and avowing that the money will be spent solely on the public purpose delineated in the contracts.

The attorney general’s office also has begun reviewing the contract language to check whether the recipient has a plan for spending the money that meets its standard for a public benefit.

Mr. Cuomo’s office, whose inspection system was first applied to grants approved in the 2006-07 budget, has sent back an unknown number of contracts to the sponsoring state agency because they did not state a legitimate public purpose.

In some cases, the agencies contacted the groups, revised the contracts, and returned them to the attorney general’s office for another review, after which the contracts were forwarded to the comptroller’s office and a check was mailed.

In other cases, however, the office never heard back from the agencies and the contract stayed in hiatus.

The grants, which used to be appropriated as a lump sum but are now lined-out in the budget, have long stood as a symbol of government excess, secrecy, and abuse.

Mr. Cuomo, at the time of his announcement, said his goal was to change that perception by opening the discretionary spending to public scrutiny.

“To me the issue has always been more of disclosure and accountability than the actual purpose and intelligence of the grant,” Mr. Cuomo said at a press conference in March 2007, flanked by Messrs. Bruno and Silver.

“When they don’t have the facts and they don’t have the information, that’s when people tend to get suspicious. It’s almost human nature. … That’s what this is about, restoring the public trust,” Mr. Cuomo said.

To that end, Albany watchdog groups are urging the attorney general to make public both the list of denied grants and the list of groups that have not submitted paperwork.

“I think it would be incumbent upon the attorney general to release that information, since he has assumed the responsibility for vetting the appropriateness of the member items,” the executive director of Citizens Union, Richard Dadey, said. “Why did he take it on and not inform the public about the outcome?”

Said the legislative counsel of the New York Public Interest Research Group, Russ Haven: “This information would be useful. If it was public, it might deter submission of those items that really didn’t have a legitimate public purpose and were attempts to slip one by.”

In recent years, a handful of lawmakers have been charged with stealing grants and funneling them to friends, family members, and aides. The indictment on Wednesday of two City Council staffers, who were accused of embezzling tens of thousands of dollars of discretionary funds, has put the City Council’s member-item practice under a similar spotlight.

While lawmakers insist the money is serving needy people and causes — much of it goes to youth and poverty programs, libraries, schools, and minority groups — watchdog groups have lamented the absence of oversight and transparency in the allocation and usage of the grants, and have accused the Legislature of making frivolous expenditures.

This year, for instance, thousands of dollars was steered to a black liberation group, an upstate public access channel that features shows about vegetables, a robot competition, an urban yoga foundation, and to a group called “Men of Exquisite Taste.”