The possibility of widespread fraud in Albany’s pork-barrel spending practices was underscored yesterday by Attorney General Cuomo, who disclosed that his rolling review of legislative handouts to community groups has uncovered hundreds of dubious contracts.

Mr. Cuomo, who last year instituted a stricter vetting process for the so-called member items, said yesterday that his office has found problems with almost half of the grants submitted for review.

His office has looked over 3,785 grants — totaling $122 million worth of contracts — out of a pool of 6,500 that lawmakers approved in the 2006-07 budget year.

Of those, the office has frozen 1,026 contracts, effectively putting on hold more than $50 million in state spending. Many groups never submitted paperwork to the office and have not received a check from the state.

Lawmakers each year dole out $200 million in funds, much of it to obscure youth and poverty programs, as well as to libraries, schools, and minority groups.

After taking office last year, Mr. Cuomo imposed a more comprehensive review of the grants, which had long been a source of corruption in Albany.

Now, before money is disbursed, recipients must sign sworn certifications disclosing potential conflicts of interest with lawmakers who sponsored the funding, and assert that the money will be used for a public purpose that is specified in the contracts.

The attorney general’s office also scans the contract language to make sure the money has an appropriate purpose.

Mr. Cuomo did not provide figures for his review of grants appropriated in the 2007-08 budget cycle. The Legislature earlier this month approved another $200 million batch of member items for the 2008-09 fiscal year.

In most of the cases, the groups receiving the money had not filed with the state charities bureau or had submitted grant proposals that Mr. Cuomo found did not serve a public purpose.

Some groups filed grants to cover operating expenses, a prohibited category of funding.

A few groups reworded their contract and resubmitted them to the office for approval. The attorney general’s office has not heard back from most of the organizations whose grants were frozen, Mr. Cuomo said.

Whether the large number of denied contracts is primarily a factor of sloppy paperwork, a misunderstanding of the rules, or a troubling gauge of abuse in the system, Mr. Cuomo would not say.

“There’s fraud everywhere,” he said. “You would be hard-pressed to find a government program or a private sector program that doesn’t have some level of fraud.”

Mr. Cuomo refused to identify the groups whose contracts were turned down, saying he needed to wait “for the conclusion of the contract process, and then we’ll make them all public.” The list of blocked grants will be disclosed “on a rolling basis in a few months,” he said.

Concerns surrounding legislative pork-barrel spending in New York has intensified in recent weeks as the New York City Council faces a widening slush-fund scandal involving grants similar to Albany’s member items.

Despite calls from civic groups for greater oversight of the funds, state officials said a more exhaustive review might not be practical.

Aides to the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, a former state assemblyman, said the office does not have a big enough budget to conduct a wider audit of the legislative grants.

“It would require resources that we don’t have,” a policy analyst in the comptroller’s office, Kristee Iacobucci, said. “We have limited number of audit resources, and our goal is to focus on those larger pots of money that are really going to find savings and identify misuse of taxpayer dollars.”

A spokesman for the comptroller, Dennis Tompkins, said the office’s 389 auditors, who are in the process of auditing every school district by 2010, perform a small number of random reviews of member items.

“If we look at a $1,000 grant to a cheese museum, it’s very difficult for us … to send bodies to this entity to look through all of the paperwork,” the spokesman said.