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NEW YORK (CBS/AP) ― A health department worker who gave a passing grade to a fast food restaurant crawling with rats conducted a shoddy inspection and showed a "disturbing lack of diligence," investigators said Monday in a scathing report on the infestation.

The Department of Investigation's report was one of two issued Monday by the city seeking to explain how the KFC/Taco Bell in Manhattan earned a passing grade after rats invaded it on Feb. 23.

The infestation, which was captured on videotape, created a national stir and prompted increased enforcement of health code rules at city eateries.

The health department, while less harsh than the Department of Investigation, found plenty of shortcomings such as the city's lacking an "adequate mechanism" to respond to repeated restaurant complaints and focusing too heavily on signs of rodent activity rather than conditions that foster infestations.

The DOI did not hold back in its criticism.

"After a thorough investigation, DOI found a disturbing lack of diligence on the part of the public health sanitarian who inspected the restaurant as well as a breakdown in the supervision of the inspector," DOI Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn said.

The DOI said the inspector, Cemone Thomas, "underreported the rodent-related findings and failed to take proper action ... which constituted a 'gross dereliction' of her duties."

On Feb. 22, Thomas documented only 87 rat droppings and didn't cite an additional 20, which would have caused the restaurant to fail the inspection and could have forced it to close immediately, the DOI said.

The DOI said evidence in the case suggested that Thomas simply couldn't be bothered to do a more comprehensive report because she might have been trying to "avoid the additional time it would have taken for further enforcement steps."

Thomas' lawyer didn't immediately return telephone messages left by The Associated Press at his office Monday.

A Department of Health spokesman, Geoffrey Cowley, said Thomas was a "superb inspector who made a very serious mistake."

"We really had no alternative but to concur with the DOI," Cowley said.

Thomas resigned Monday before the contents of the rat reports were released publicly. She would have been canned if she hadn't quit, Cowley said.

One of Thomas' supervisors, the food safety program's director of customer service, was accused of fumbling DOH procedures in the reports. The supervisor was being reassigned and will no longer have supervisory responsibilities within the department, but there was no talk of firing her, Cowley said.

Both investigations revealed problems within the inspection system.

There were failings of personnel, policy and practice, health Commissioner Dr. Thomas R. Frieden said.

"We have identified weaknesses in our system for handling restaurant complaints and combating rodent infestations," Frieden said.

One of those was responding to multiple complaints against a restaurant, such as in the case of the KFC/Taco Bell. The health department first received a complaint against the KFC/Taco Bell on Jan. 22. In the complaint, someone said a rat fell from the ceiling as he or she was eating.

And from Dec. 23, 2006, to Feb. 12, 2007, the city received calls on its 311 telephone complaint hot line about the restaurant, including one in which an employee was apparently bitten by a rat.

In response to the KFC/Taco Bell fiasco, Cowley said "a lot of things are going to change."

Among them: The city intends to develop a system to monitor 311 records for restaurant complaints, to establish a threshold for inspection based on the nature, frequency and timing of complaints and to revise the inspection system to place greater emphasis on conditions that attract and sustain pests.

In the wake of the incident, the parent company of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut said it had asked a leading rat expert to review company standards at its New York outlets. The company apologized for the rats and said it was working to ensure another infestation didn't happen again.

(© 2007 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)