Slashdot Mirror
Four IT Consultants Charged With $80M NYC Rip-Off
theodp writes "It's I-told-you-so time for Slashdot commenter frnic, who smelled a crime last March after reading that New York City had dropped $722 million on its still-under-development CityTime Attendance System. Nine months later, US Attorney Preet Bharara charged 'four consultants to the New York City Office of Payroll Administration ... for operating a fraudulent scheme that led to the misappropriation of more than $80 million in New York City funds allocated for an information technology project known as "CityTime."' Three of the four consultants were also charged — along with a consultant's wife and mother — with using a network of friends-and-family shell corporations to launder the proceeds of the fraud. Dept. of Investigations Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn called it a shame that 'supposed experts hired and paid well to protect the city's interests were exposed as the fox guarding the hen house.'"
It's I-told-you-so time for Slashdot commenter frnic, who smelled a crime last March
So many accusations of criminal behavior are made on Slashdot daily that sooner or later one was bound to be right.
How does something "slip through the cracks" for 7 years?
A project that was $68 million total... instead was $100+ million (a year?!!)
If the city DIDN'T spend MORE-THAN-HALF-A-BILLION maybe they wouldn't be raising the fare on the subway/bus for the 3rd time in just a few years.
Here's a thought.. once a year look at projects and see if they were supposed to be done already. You can pay someone $1,000 a MINUTE to do this and still save money by finding another project like this.
...is that everyone does it differently, and no one wants to conform to a uniform system. Why, you might ask? Because the current system is in place and, more importantly, people have learned how to game it.
I went through something like this years ago with a local government t&a project. There was a core group that understood it's value ( namely, IT and payroll ), but everyone else had been using tricks of the current, in place system ( which varied from dept to dept ) to get longer lunches, swap shifts or plain, flat out not work and get paid for it.
We never did get universal buy-in for the project, and it ended up dieing ( although, to be fair, the vendor didn't help things much ). Even in the best of times, T&A is a highly complex subject that almost no one understands. When you have people actively trying to undermine your efforts...well, you can imagine how much progress one might make.
( note: the depts that gave us the most headaches, btw, were fire and police. The "old boy" network had been in place so "billy bob" might take off a couple extra hours because he was the chief's friend. Needless to say, the new time keeping software didn't keep track of that "accurately", and people's feelings got hurt. )
The second most important single document in project management - the stakeholders list.
The most misunderstood term in project management - stakeholder.
Stakeholder == anyone who might possibly want to stab you with a pointy stick.
Most important document - a list of motivations and pain points of the stakeholders. Third most important - payment terms. Fourth - project delivery specifications.
Feel free to disagree, and, good luck.
;-p